#Strixhaven: School of Mages

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Fracture

"Your defiance is amusing, little mage. It's time you learn how fragile you really are." —Extus Narr

Artist: Miranda Meeks TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[mtg-art-daily]

Mavinda, Students' Advocate

Artist: Wesley Burt

[incorrect-mtg]

Flavor Text Highlights - Strixhaven: School of Mages + Commander 2021

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Cool - Sudden Breakthrough

Rootha created constantly, passionately, in hopes of impressing her greatest critic: herself.

Funny - Wake the Past

“Belong in a museum? I think we should let relics belong wherever they please!” —Quintorius, Lorehold mage-student

Worldbuilding - Confront the Past

“Why, Gideon? Of all people, why save me?”

Emotional - Go Blank

The only feeling worse than not knowing the answer is the certainty that you once did.

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[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Excavated Wall by Zezhou Chen

[mtg-flavor]

Tedin, Mark. Swords to Plowshares. 2021, Strixhaven: School of Mages - Mystical Archive

“The blademaster turned his fury to his new foes: root rot and cabbage slugs.” —Myths and Miracles, Vol. VII

[rookthebird]

thinking about the students at strixhaven slowly gathering clues that reveal that the mysterious, taciturn, never tells anyone anything about her personal life and has no mementoes in her office, SCARY Professor Onyx is *married* but not to who.

however, once they find that out, it's clear she's very proud of her husband. Occassionally she drops random information no context, always very smug about it. her husband is a war hero. her husband did time in jail and it was formative for him. her husband likes watching her zombie hordes eat their shared enemies alive. her husband is the only person she'd trust to guard her back while performing certain spells.

meanwhile the Mage Tower coach everyone likes talks all the time about his beautiful wife Lili. Lili is trained as a healer and she's brilliant at it. Lili takes her coffee with four sugars. Lili sulks if she doesn't get her good-night kiss. Lili is the oldest of seven sisters and one brother and loves children, though she can't have any of her own. Lili doesn't sleep as well when he's away from her. Lili once put her life in danger to save innocent people on Ravnica, and her screams in that moment still haunt him.

So, 99% of the school think that Professor Onyx is this intimidating necromancy teacher married to an equally scary military ex-convict, and that Coach Jura has a wife who's a healer who's just as kind and sweet as he is.

And when someone arrives early for a meeting and sees Professor Onyx and Coach Jura kissing passionately on her desk... clearly the assumption is that Professor Onyx has seduced the nice coach into cheating on his wife with her! Or perhaps even used mind-magic!

Some overly passionate Prismari students catch Professor Onyx sitting on Coach Jura's lap with her hand on his chest in the school gardens, and immediately go into a tirade. "Don't you realize he's married, and so are you?" "Coach Jura, what would your wife think?"

Professor Onyx just turns to look at them, utterly unbothered. "You do realize my first name is Liliana?"

[markrosewater]

Now that the polls are closed on your "Top Down/Bottom Up" questions, may you please reveal the correct answers?

Here are the results of the poll:

Ixalan

Top-down: 38.9%

*Bottom-up: 61/.1

Strixhaven School of Mages

*Top-down: 54.7%

Bottom-up: 45.3%

Phyrexia: All Will Be One

*Top-down: 51.8%

Bottom-up: 48.2%

The answer is all three sets were bottom-up designs.

Ixalan was built as a typal set making use of the two two-color and two-three color faction structure we had originally planned to use for Khans of Tarkir.

Strixhaven was built as an enemy-colored faction set with an emphasis on "instants and sorceries" matter.

Phyrexia: All Will Be One was built around making poison structurally work.

All three sets had strong flavor components that we integrated into the design, but the structure of all three had a mechanical core.

The easiest way to think about this is that if you take a top-down set and remove all the flavor components (names, art, creature types, flavor text, etc.) the structure will just seem like random mechanical elements were thrown together while a bottom-up set will have an orderly structure.

[pep-rambles]

In Good Company (7569 words) by Pep_Writes Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon), Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Emily/Molly (Hazbin Hotel), Angel Dust & Molly (Hazbin Hotel), Charlie Magne | Morningstar & Molly (Hazbin Hotel) Characters: Molly (Hazbin Hotel), Emily (Hazbin Hotel), Angel Dust (Hazbin Hotel), Vaggie (Hazbin Hotel), Vox (Hazbin Hotel), friend's ocs, Friend's PCs, Greta Gorunn (Dungeons & Dragons) Additional Tags: Background Chaggie, tiny background huskerdust, Illustrated, House Party, Set: Strixhaven: School of Mages (Magic: The Gathering), Based on a Real Campaign, Read series notes, Fluff, AuDHD Emily, A third not so secret fandom thrown in there, Mutual Pining, Battle Series: Part 2 of One Helluva Life at Strixhaven Summary: Molly invites Emily to a house party. It's their first real time hanging out outside of school. Things go a little back and forth but it's all fine as long as they are with each other.

Part 2 of "One Helluva Life at Strixhaven" is out! Read for cute Emolly fluff, frog races and battles, Vox being a dick, Charlie being an absolute awkward cutie pie, twin banter, and overall nerdy fun!

[thecornwall]

Cornwall's Random Card of the Day #957: Mavinda, Students' Advocate

Mavinda, Students' Advocate is a mythic rare from Strixhaven: School of Mages.

This is a weird effect. They try to avoid putting "{0}:" in a cost anymore. I woulda thought it would be {8}: and then saying it cost {8} less to activate if it targets a creature you control. But perhaps the way the rules works precludes this from working. Either way, seems like a fun ability. Making a deck around combat trick recursion sounds like fun.

[dbarenzu626-mtg]

Perchance to a Introduction Post!

Artwork by Ryan Pancoast, "Zimone, Quandrix Prodigy", Strixhaven: School of Mages

Ahh, welcome to my humble grounds! If you're a Planeswalker or a fellow fan of the TCG game Magic: The Gathering, welcome!

My name's Dylan, or @dbarenzu626 if you know me from my main blog: Canadian artist, writer and hobbyist. And more recently, MTG player, specifically in the Commander format. I got started this year thanks to one of my cousins, which then spurred me to pick up my first Commander precon in the form of Timey-Wimey from a Wal-Mart. Since then? I have grown my arsenal of decks far beyond, even considering decklists I have in progress ATM.

I love this card game dearly, at a time when my life was entering a strange period, Commander came in and became a bastion of fun for me, whether it have been looking into what cards to build for or even what to add to the 99 of a deck or coming to a table with a new deck ready to just play and enjoy, it's been nothing short of refreshing.

It's worth noting that I'm no TCG newbie either, my first TCGs were Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! back in the day and currently in this day and age, I stuck to Disney Lorcana and Digimon before converging into MTG Commander. To say I always loved collecting cardboard would be an understatement and that obsession has helped me in my deckbuilding!

So why start this blog? To chronicle my adventures with this game, of course!

As this blog starts up, I wanna share what to expect from my cardboard hideaway! So here we go:

Decklists! I wanna share some of my decklists of Commander decks I've built or are currently in the process of building. These decklists may range from being janky to average to even higher power level, but ultimately, I make some of these just to have fun with flavour and build decks I love in the end. Decklists will be talked about with strategies and experiences and I will be sharing lists via Moxfield or ManaBox, to be decided.

Interactions/battles I've had within Commander! The archetype always welcomes new friends and new playstyles and something I love, win or lose, is just the unique energy everyone brings to their deck projects or to battles. It makes my own deckbuilding feel more fruitful and by all means, I wanna talk about experiences like that.

New product unboxings and/or pack results! With Magic, the idea of always getting new cards and/or projects is going to be a reality. So discounting bulk and singles I'm buying, I wanna post about new products I pick up too, whether they be bundles or boxes or even Secret Lair drops and the results that come from them. Sets like Final Fantasy and Spider-Man next year more than invite this for me (these are sets I'm going all in on) and I know with the other original sets like Aetherdrift and Edges of Eternities that I may partake in a few packs or even a Commander deck. Heck, I may even have a few Secret Lairs coming my way already I wanna talk about...

Potentially, a "Card of the Day" feature! It may or may not be daily as I don't think I personally have the capacity to keep up with daily posts, but with so many cards in this game, I'd love to feature some of my favourites, be them for art or for treatments or even for powerhouse abilities. And yes, I may do this at length like with the decklists too, I like talking about certain things or combos you could pull off with a card.

Lastly, questions! These'll be open always, so if you wanna swing a question for me, whether it's a card you want my opinion of or a decklist I'm currently building for or a favourite card treatment or set? You can feel more than free to fire away, this is something I will always respond to (within reason, I probably won't be responding to any hateful comments, be them directed at how I build decks or at my choice of cards regardless of normal or even the hot topic of Universes Beyond sets. Ask and ye may receive!

Hopefully I can meet other players, connect here and have fun with this blog! For now though, let's get his Planeswalking hike going, shall we? Allons-y~! <3

[ozcarr]

oz can you tell me about your tabletop robot guy who is sometimes a regular guy sometime I'm so curious

Gingey you are so real for this because you FUCKING KNOW I’ll write an essay about him. But I will give you the (still extremely long) reader's digest version.

His name is Aurelio and he's Wizard/Fighter in me and the homies' hiatus-ed Strixhaven (D&D magic college) game.

idk if you have familiarity with Eberron and the Warforged but basically there was this huge century-long, continental war, and things progressed to the extent the government was manufacturing soldiers to like. You know, fight and kill and die for them. Aurelio was built by a private contractor to be a battle mage and gained consciousness 2 days before a peace treaty was signed and all the Warforged were granted citizens' rights. So he was never dispatched and spent the following year and a half kind of just rotting away in a workshop, only 90% finished with only books and newspapers to learn about the world from.

A lot of the people in Ebberon do NOT like the warforged because they're relics of a really scary and dire war (and also they're like. Built to be soldiers, with all that entails.) Aurelio is really book-smart but has a lot of internalized guilt about being inherently dangerous and he also kind of lacks identity. And he's mesmerized by life and death and the human experiences — stuff like falling in love and growing old. He's determined that the only way he'll ever be happy is if he somehow becomes an organic lifeform, and decides that the best way to go about achieving that is through reincarnation (a spell that must be performed by a 9th level druid). Whether becoming a Regular Guy would ACTUALLY fix him or not... remains to be seen. What he wants and what I want for him are usually sorta at odds.

Anyway -- what better place to find a high-level mage than academia? So Aurelio gets really good at basic illusion spells and crafts a little persona based on his creator and his creator's two sons. Cause he doesn't wanna make people uncomfortable. And he thinks he’d be happier playing out this little fantasy.

He steals some military academy records, and ships himself off to Wizard College... in hopes that he can live some facsimile of human (elf?) experience, secure the allyship of a druid, figure out what he wants to do with his life one he gets it, then self-destruct at the opportune time so that his new druid buddy can randomly generate him a new body.

But he makes all these wonderful friends and has to keep them at arm's length because he's constantly lying to them, even though he's a terrible liar. Until he feels he can't do it anymore and finally tells them. But he's in too deep, he's married to his little lie (not to mention he faked his identity to the school), so he just keeps up with the disguise -- up until recent in-game events which caused his world to shatter a little bit.

He's super emotional (because he's basically brand new and every feeling is new and horrible), a little mischievous, cagey, lacks tact, and is constantly fucking up his interpersonal relationships. But he’s well-meaning and earnest. All he knows how to do is lie (illusion magic) and wreck shit (lighting-damage evocation magic). He wants to be a good, gentle person and a good friend but he's so self-involved that his actions usually backfire in some way.

That's the guy! He's a mess!

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Shadrix Silverquill

Artist: Kekai Kotaki TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[mtg-art-daily]

Hall Monitor

"No unauthorized summoning. No writing in the library books. And absolutely no indoor dueling!"

Artist: Forrest Imel

[school-of-all-time]

Round Two, Bracket 6

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Velomachus Lorehold by Raymond Swanland

[nerdnag]

OH MY GOD FE3H CHARACTERS AS STUDENTS AT THE STRIXHAVEN SCHOOL OF MAGES. THE CROSSOVER WE ALL NEED (ESPECIALLY ME)

HUBERT AND EDELGARD AS SILVERQUILL INK MAGES WHO WILL STOP AT NOTHING TO ACHIEVE THEIR GOALS AND WILL CUT YOU DOWN WITH THE VERY SHARPEST OF WORDS (AND INK PROJECTILES) IF YOU CHOOSE TO STAND AGAINST THEM

CONSTANCE AS A PRISMARI MAGE TRYING TO GET HER BIG BREAK AS AN ELEMENTAL ARTIST

LYSITHEA AS A WITHERBLOOM MAGE WHO TEMPTS DEATH ITSELF TO ACHIEVE HER AIMS

DIMITRI AS A LOREHOLD MAGE, SUMMONING THE SPIRITS OF HIS OWN PAST TO AID HIM IN BATTLE

CLAUDE IN WITHERBLOOM, PLAYING AROUND WITH POISONS AND BONDING WITH PESTS

LINHARDT AS A QUANDRIX MATHS NERD WHO BENDS TIME AND SPACE ITSELF TO GIVE HIMSELF MORE NAPPING OPPORTUNITIES

HAPI IN WITHERBLOOM, ASHE IN LOREHOLD, IGNATZ IN PRISMARI, LORENZ IN SILVERQUILL, BYLETH IN QUANDRIX