General [STX] Strixhaven Spoilers

I'm really curious how they will handle the mystical archive cards on arena. No way they will allow demonic tutor and stp for historic, right? :(

I'm too scared to be excited about drafting Strixhaven yet, as I fear they might not have the extra spice on arena and I don't think I'll be able to draft the set in paper for money, time and pandemic reasons.
 
I'm really curious how they will handle the mystical archive cards on arena. No way they will allow demonic tutor and stp for historic, right? :(

I'm too scared to be excited about drafting Strixhaven yet, as I fear they might not have the extra spice on arena and I don't think I'll be able to draft the set in paper for money, time and pandemic reasons.
Seven of the Mystical Archive cards will not be legal in Historic. I believe they will still be programed into Arena for Draft, Cube, and potentially Brawl purposes, but not for the constructed formats.
 
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This card looks good. It gets pretty big fast just by casting removal. Definitely testing.

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The other new mechanic is learn. First you learn...

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Then you get a lesson!
 
Learn seems like a pretty parasitic mechanic for cube, unless you're willing to have a pile of lessons for your drafters and they don't have to draft these subpar sorceries.
Is it really though? The number of playable cards at any given power level is steadily increasing as time goes on. These days, I'm finding that people are leaving 10 or even 15 cards that are playable in their colors in the sideboard. Lessons are nice because they don't eat up space in the main deck- they make sideboard space actually useable!

The barrier of entry for these cards, it seems, is the quality of the spells with learn. If the learn cards are things that we would want to play by themselves, then both learn and lessons can make it into the cube. If the cards with learn are all terrible, then there is no point in including lessons. Learn is greatly helped by the fact that learning can become rummaging when there isn't a lesson you need at that moment.

Professor of Symbology looks good enough to consider playing. I'd need more good learn before I'd pull the trigger on such a keyword, but there's definitely a good start.
 
If you're worried about space, making the house rule that Lesson = Arcane might be a relatively elegant way to stitch things together. Also, between this and Runes I'm wondering if WotC is going to be more amenable to using noncreature subtypes in the future. I'd imagine that this results from the positive reaction to Cartouches and Trials in Amonkhet.
 
Yes! It looks like Strixhaven will be giving us enough toys to support spell-slinging in colors that don't traditionally dabble in that kind of thing, like Green and White.

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This is basically perfect for a future rendition of Afternoon Delight. That third ability on Augusta is pretty cool too. Hopefully we'll get some other MDFCs that fit my (weirdly specific) requirements.

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I hope we get a Lesson with Learn.
 
Is it really though? The number of playable cards at any given power level is steadily increasing as time goes on. These days, I'm finding that people are leaving 10 or even 15 cards that are playable in their colors in the sideboard. Lessons are nice because they don't eat up space in the main deck- they make sideboard space actually useable!

The barrier of entry for these cards, it seems, is the quality of the spells with learn. If the learn cards are things that we would want to play by themselves, then both learn and lessons can make it into the cube. If the cards with learn are all terrible, then there is no point in including lessons. Learn is greatly helped by the fact that learning can become rummaging when there isn't a lesson you need at that moment.

Professor of Symbology looks good enough to consider playing. I'd need more good learn before I'd pull the trigger on such a keyword, but there's definitely a good start.

If people have to draft the lessons too I certainly think it is. You don't give up deck space, but cube real estate. I don't want to free a slot in my golgari hybrid section for Pest Summoning. It's just not worth it without learn-cards. You need to draft mechanic A and B, and I highly doubt we will get enough of either in one single set for most cube sizes and power levels.
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
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Oh man these are pretty

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Is this new? I think I've made this exact custom


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I think I'm interested on the front half but the back half might stand in the way of that
 
If people have to draft the lessons too I certainly think it is. You don't give up deck space, but cube real estate. I don't want to free a slot in my golgari hybrid section for Pest Summoning. It's just not worth it without learn-cards. You need to draft mechanic A and B, and I highly doubt we will get enough of either in one single set for most cube sizes and power levels.
While it's possible that cube real estate could be a problem when implementing Learn+Lessons, that isn't necessarily going to be the case. If the floor of the Learn cards is good enough, adding lessons to the cube becomes a free roll.

You have to remember that any card that doesn't make it into a player's mainboard is effectively a wasted slot, at least for that draft. Since players draft 45 card pools, but a deck only requires 40 cards, there is always going to be at least 5 cards "spoiled" per player per draft. This calculation also assumes that every land in the deck was drafted as a part of the pool- something which is very unlikely in most cubes. Now obviously some number of unplayed cards are going to be off-color as the result of the end of the pack, pivots, or failed build-arounds. However, there are still often a substantial number of real playables that get cut from a player's final deck. Using Cube space on cards which can effect the game from sideboards is a strategy to reduce the number of cards that outside the game.

It's also important to consider the fact that learn is far less parasitic than other mechanics that care about specific things such as Energy, Mutate, or Tribal themes. One does not need a single lesson in their cube for a learn card to be worthwhile, provided that the rummage trigger is something that is desirable for their deck. I would consider playing the Professor of Symbology as is- it has a lot of overlap with a lot of different decks in my cube! Unless the professor is the best Learn card in the set (which I doubt it is), there's going to be some number of playable Learn cards. At that point, running Lessons is a great means to boost the power level of cards we are already playing.

I could easily see a cube with only 3 or so Learn cards and a single Lesson.
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I'm not all that jazzed about a W1 2/1 ETB rummage.
and the lesson cards would need to be strong enough to want to cast but weak enough to not actually want in your maindeck.
Or just provided free, and I don't love that because it's like a flip card you need to flip through the basics box to parse.
 
Not a fan of Lessons so far. Might change if a few are spoiled that are worth a card slot on their own within a cube, but this feels very much like energy so far where it'll be sweet in Limited but mostly parasitic elsewhere. Or cards that reference Lessons will just end up being narrow trinket text ala Birgi, God of Storytelling and Boast.
 
I'm cautiously optimistic about Lessons, at least for a low-powered cube. At the very least, the colorless ones might be interesting?

Let's take this card for example:

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I could see drafting this Lesson in a few different situations:
  1. I'm in a cube where removal is generally this expensive anyway, so this is on par.
  2. I drafted into a color pair without good answers to a particular card type. The classic example being a Rakdos deck vs. enchantments.
  3. I've drafted cards with Learn on them, and it's a silver bullet I can go and grab.
I think it's important to keep in mind that we've only seen five Lessons so far, and four of them have been commons. I remember being much cooler on Foretell when the first few cards were spoiled because they were all the boring cards. Maybe that's the case here?
 
I’m split. I think both Ravnic and Train man has some excellent arguments. I do feel like it is parasitic if the lesson cards are way lower power level than the rest of the cube. I do think that they could be non-parasitic if the entire cube is on the same power level as the lesson cards.

On a sleightly different subject, I found this one promising

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And this one to be less below par than the other spoiled lessons so far (IMO)

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If you end up running enough of the colorless Lessons, it looks like there's already the potential for a low-powered toolbox deck centered in White:

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