Damn am I ambivalent about Strixhaven

onering
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Post by onering » 2 years ago

I don't think any set has ever elicited such mixed feelings from me. Typically, I see sets as generally good (OG Ravnica sets, Alara Block, New Phyrexia), generally bad (BFZ, Dragon's Maze), or generally just ok (new Theros, Scars of Mirrodin block except for New Phyrexia). At most, I'll feel that a set has good flavor and bad mechanics, or vice versa. But Strixhaven pulls me in a lot of different directions,

First, the only thing that I can say is entirely bad: the flavor. This is one of the worst settings magic has ever visited. While magical schools have been done in the past, and even in this franchise with the Tolarian Academy, Strixhaven is such a naked Harry Potter ripoff its embarrassing. I want to be clear that its not an issue with Harry Potter, its an issue with how lazy creative was when making this world that they tried to just hit every beat of that universe to the point of making it barely more than a reskin. They did the bare minimum to at least make the 'schools' marginally distinct from the Harry Potter Houses, but 4 of them are still pretty much just riffs on the Houses with Prismari being the only standout (since it was the only one cut from a fresh cloth). I could have gotten behind the idea of a mages school divided into thematic houses, sorry 'schools', if there was more originality elsewhere, but unfortunately Creative decided to treat an IP the same way they treat mythology and just reskin tropes. While this works somewhat with myth, I think it fails miserably when aping a closed IP. With Greek myth or fairy tales, everything is public domain and there are sometimes dozens of takes on stories and competing traditions, with the corpus of myth being reduced to the pop culture imagining of its tropes with a few deeper dives being an effective enough way to tackle it. Harry Potter and other IPs don't work that way. Especially not HP, where Rowling micromanages her universe. So when you print Generic Snape as a professor in Store Brand Slytherin, it comes off not as "Magic's take on a story" but as "The Asylum Presents: Atlantic Rim." This is the direct to DVD mockbuster approach, and it sucks. Extend this to Magetower (XFL Quidditch), the villain (former student turns EBIL and attacks the school), the style of the names (Especially the Elder Dragons, and on that topic naming the schools after those founding Elder Dragons), etc, it just fails to be its own thing. This is all made worse by the fact that Wizards is going to be releasing special sets that just directly print cards based on other IPs, like Lord of the Rings. Since there is nothing in this set or story that makes a case that this setting needed to exist, its pretty clear that it exists solely because they wanted to do Harry Potter, and that they didn't just actually do Harry Potter in a special set raises questions. Maybe they couldn't get use of the IP, in which case bad form WotC, or they didn't decide to do these special sets until well into Strixhaven's development, in which case bad luck and also very possible.

Another thing the set fails to do is give any indication of what the world is like beyond the school. There's some scraps about an ancient war, ruins, and spirits, as well as some trolls, but the world is incredibly undeveloped. This is unfortunate, because I think that further developing the world could have been an opportunity to make this feel less like a Harry Potter ripoff, positioning the school against a threat that didn't originate in their community, or showing it as a force that helps secure peace between several nations that all send students. As an aside, this is one of the big problems with the single set model, we just don't spend enough time with these worlds to both develop a setting and tell a story. Either the setting is established and the story seems scant (at least when engaging with the cards and online stories, obviously an ebook can easily make up the difference), or the story is developed but the setting isn't explored enough (Kaldheim suffered from this severely, as there was a lot of cool ideas there that just got rushed through). Strixhaven seems to do both.


Now onto the mixed things.

Mechanically, Strixhaven plays with some interesting ideas, but doesn't always succeed, and it also plays with some rather uninspired ones as well. Modal DFCs already seem like a well that they are drawing from too often. They lose their specialness when they show up too much, and they work poorly in commander/brawl (as the sides are often designed to compliment each other). I appreciate, though, that this poor compatibility with commander translates into a reason to play non singleton formats, and WotC continued (or perhaps renewed) commitment to them. Learn is interesting, another mechanic that plays poorly in commander, but a well designed outside the game mechanic overall. I appreciate that they were cautious here, as pushing it too hard could have been a disgusting mistake like Companions, but overall the mechanic is fairly weak, with few worthwhile lessons and Learn cards that aren't all that special either. Still, its something that can be interesting in standard. It works well enough in limited, but even there I feel like I'm bumping up against its power level wall, with the CA and ability to easily access removal being sometimes just barely worth the mediocrity (at best) of most of the cards themselves. The schools themselves are tied to mostly mediocre mechanics, often under developed. Fractals are flavorful yet there is only one card that actually cares about them (and is itself limited chaff), so aside from the handful of cards that make fractals that are independently good its a forgettable and irrelevant type/mechanic. They could have easily been elementals and been far more interesting. Inklings, and the general flying subtheme in Silverquill are pretty generic, the incidental life gain and pests seem like limited only mechanics, and the 8 lands matter theme is barely there. The only thing that stands out is Boros graveyard matters, because it adds something to the color pair. Magecraft is what it is, a mechanic we've seen before and will see again, as generic as they come. Ward might be the coup of the set, and its a new evergreen that honestly could have been introduced to any set.

The limited environment is interesting, but again mixed. Its yet another limited where you can just be blown out because someone opened a great bomb and your window to not die is incredibly small. Aside from that, things are pretty mixed. Drafting with learn, as an AB mechanic, is kind of annoying, but learn not being dead without lessons, and lessons being bad enough that most should wheel so you can grab all but the best with throwaway late pack picks, makes it a lot better to draft than most ABs. The set plays, and drafts, more like some old school environments like RGD or Invasion Block, with creature quality and density mattering a bit less and grinding advantage mattering more. Removal is more prevalent than usual, buoyed by Intro to Annihilation being learned left and right, but a lot of it is conditional or has drawbacks. Most creatures and spells have wonky details or specific uses, or further the grindy play of the set. I kind of like it most of the time, as an old school drafter, but it can also be as drawn out as Invasion Block which can be tiresome after awhile. Grinding to turn 10-12 is a feature, grinding to turn 22 is a bug.

That's what I got, just wanted to rant a bit and express how ??? this set is to me. I'm wondering if anyone else is in the same place, where if someone asked you if its a good set you wouldn't know the answer.

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motleyslayer
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Post by motleyslayer » 2 years ago

I feel that the limited for this set is actually super interesting from my experience but everything else is just super boring. I never even really got into Harry Potter and Strixhaven is similar enough to make me not care either. It seems like the schools while being unique enough from the same colour guilds but still seem close enough for me to not care. The set itself isn't too strong either

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BeneTleilax
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Post by BeneTleilax » 2 years ago

The set tastes like air. It's not that it has no taste, air has a taste to it, just one we've gotten so accustomed to that we filter it out. The art is all the same MCU/League of Legends rainbowy quasi-cartoon style that's been circulating in the sci-fi, fantasy and gaming circles for half a decade now at least. Even within Magic, we've just had two other recent sets, in Zendikar III and Ikoria, with that art and narrative style. The vaguely urban-fantasy trappings also feel painfully safe, a mix of Ravnica reheated and YA fantasy from the early 10s. Whenever I look at a card from STX, I can faintly hear upbeat synths.

Magical schools are so played out that their satires and post-genre have concluded, been adapted to TV, and gotten old by now. Now, that may mean the genre's in a good place for a revival, but Strixhaven isn't that. The nostalgia of first getting into Wizard of Earthsea, or Harry Potter, or whichever other example you read as a kid is for the wonder, at least for me. The forests were dark and full of strange creatures, things slithered in the cracks of the world that were part of something larger than the plot. Now they're all taxonomized on fan wikis with authoritative links to the Official Encyclopedia of Demystified Animals, but they weren't. Strixhaven has forgotten that mystery, not only in its aforementioned artstyle, but in how neat it is. STX has no Orvar, no Nephilim, no strange being that doesn't fit at first glance with everything else. It feels like that joke about all the comedians simply referring to their old bits by number.

As I mentioned in my Silverquill rant (viewtopic.php?t=34792), Creative also seems hellbent on crushing any geniune sense of stakes in this set. I get that not everything needs to be apocalyptic, but Extus is a limper threat even than Belzenlok. He has no motivation other than cartoon villainy and his followers are the blandest sort of NPC cultists. The protagonists are similarly trite. If WotC continues to dumb down the main plot by saying the cards should tell the story, then the cards damn well better explain the characters motivations, how they change, and why I should care. They did this well with Kaldheim, they did this excellently with Scars, it's clear they can do it, should they care.

Mechanically, the set feels fairly paint-by-numbers as well, outside of Learn. Learn is a great take on how to do instant/sorcery tokens, of a kind, and I hope they keep developing it. Magecraft is eh, it's very AB and despite being more complex, still feels like a duller copy of the Jeskai from Tarkir. Ward... exists, although it's a fine substitute for hexproof. The MDFCs are fine, but are like much of this set, failed by their flavor. I have no sense of their duality, of why these two characters/events are on the same card. They're both coadmistrators? This seems like such a missed opportunity to further develop those character by having one side be a signature spell in the vein of Dominaria, or draw on the surprisingly pervasive scène à faire of tulpas and totems in the magical school genre for the creature//creature cards, or done something.

So yeah, to me Strixhaven serves to illustrate the importance of flavour in shaping perception of the set, even if you're not a "vorthos". Unless they devote more than a token effort to it, everything else just tastes like air. Slightly stale, recirculated air.

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motleyslayer
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Post by motleyslayer » 2 years ago

I think that Learn/Lessons may be the one good takeaway from this set. It's a different enough take on the concept of "wish" cards. It's just not as absurd as lessons are a determined subset of cards that need to have that type. Ward has existed in some form, IE Kira, Great Glass-Spinner type cards

another question I have is that are "magical/wizard schools" type themes just overdone now?

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BeneTleilax
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Post by BeneTleilax » 2 years ago

motleyslayer wrote:
2 years ago
another question I have is that are "magical/wizard schools" type themes just overdone now?
I don't think so, but I think they need to be rebuilt from first principles. When something saturates the popular consciousness, it's so easy as a writer to just go "you know that thing from Harry Potter, yeah, this is like that". Such shortcuts are the death of genres. I think that's especially the case for Harry Potter because of the fanfic culture that has developed around it. I have nothing against fanfics or their creators, but when you have enough fanfiction, and enough franchised crap, you get people who consume media heavily, but have effectively grown up consuming nothing but Harry Potter. That's a very stifling reference pool, and I think the sway of its biggest fish across the subgenre, and across YA as a whole until very recently, has inhibited creativity and growth.

I also think the subgenre got sanitized in the backlash against the Satanic Panic moms. Even the first Harry Potter books had something of the scholomance in them, in the implicit tradeoff of safety for freedom and magical power. I'm not saying that magical schools have to get all dark and edgy, but they can't have guardrails either. Cracking open Wizard of Earthsea, or Der Zauberlehrling, or Philosopher's Stone as a little kid drew on the fantasy of sneaking off into the woods at night, except the fireflies were stranger and the shadows were deeper. The wonder and peril of meddling in forces beyond your ken is one of the timeless fantasies of wizardry, and one of the timeless fantasies of children.

Of late, modern notions of childcare have collided with this, demanding that the adults should be responsible for our heroes. This may be practical in reality, but destroys the agency of the characters in fiction. The need to shame the grownups for their negligence should the protagonists wander off into wonder and peril also flattens the morality of such tales. The formless danger of the nocturnal forest is a much more refreshing antagonist than the mentor turning out to be the Bad Guy who's responsible for All The Bad Things because he let the protagonists enter it.

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Post by RxPhantom » 2 years ago

I haven't been too jazzed by a new set in general, let alone one with such derivative window dressing as Strixhaven. I think they did a solid job within the constraints of Harry Potter world, but it still feels like Harry Potter by another name. They even had to do the big round glasses with Zimone, Quandrix Prodigy.
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Post by The N82O Molecule » 2 years ago

I like the enemy color and that they are trying to generate something dual colored that is not Ravnica.

but I need my flavor and lore I guess.

on ravnica, its all covered in city, got it, and there are factions vying for territory amongst themselves. ok got it.

on Strixhaven, there's a school, well ok a "school of schools" there could be more, or not. this school only teaches opposing magics to a student, we do not know if non opposing magics are taught anywhere. no rogue students saying hey, maybe music and math are a lot alike. (im digressing) there is one library that has all the magic spells of the multiverse, do we know if its in the middle of the campus or a campus or between campuses or is it its own im losing it its over im meh

im meh about it.

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