Strixhaven

by Adana Washington, Aysha U. Farah (Contributor), Reinhardt Suarez (Contributor)

Stories by Adana Washington for the Strixhaven bloc for the game Magic the Gathering. Side stories by: Aysha U. Farah, Reinhardt Suarez, Innocent Chizaram Ilo, MarcusTerrell Smith.

Genres: Fantasy

111 pages, ebook

Published April 1, 2021

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

An okay filler story, clearly meant to bridging characterization from set to set (setting up for Liliana to have a redemption arc, for example) and be a plane that WotC can return to. I didn't really love the main story, though I didn't really hate it either; it was just...okay.

I didn't really care at all about the side stories, though. These were pretty much all slice-of-lifeish stories about a random (non 'walker) student from each college, and I didn't really care about any of them. They were all worldbuilding that will be important to Strixhaven if we ever return to the plance (which we might not, considering I heard nothing but complaints about the set: everything from 'it's a reskin of Harry Potter' to 'the cards just suck'), but for now is just...not important and that I didn't considering to be particularly interesting.

Feel free to take this judgement with a grain of salt, though, because I'm trying to catch up on lore (I had major issues last year IRL and didn't read much Magic lore because of it) and anything that's not really relevant to the story of New Phyrexia is just sort of there. I might come back and reread this at some point to see if I have a different opinion when not trying to catch up on five sets worth of stories, but for now the judgement is that Strixhaven isn't really a set I liked.

[MajesticalLion · Rating 2 out of 5]

This SUCKED. Even Test of Metal was better than this. Will and Rowan have a compelling dynamic, but that is where my compliments end. There's hardly a story, Lilliana and Lukka are both shoehorned in for no reason, (ESPECIALLY Lukka), and the Oriq are awful, motivationless losers. They're like Team Star from Pokemon S/V. They try to make a Voldemort character, but without any of the sinister motivations that make him so intimidating. Instead his motivation is that he got expelled from Strixhaven as a kid. He was told he'd never amount to anything by a professor once and his response was to spend the next 20+ years creating a cult of school shooters so that he can summon a giant blood avatar. And in a format that usually leaves the side stories as a saving grace, this one in particular had some bottom of the barrel side stories too. The only good article in this entire book was the Silverquill side story, A Silent Voice Calls. I hope to God that this is as bad as it gets. We'll find out next time in Innistrad: Midnight Hunt.

[Parish · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strixhaven is not beating the "Harry Potter" allegations, for SURE.

Lukka joining the Oriq felt really forced to me. He didn't really have any real reason to side with them and destroy Strixhaven. I get not liking the oracles and their superiority complex, but is that really worth putting hundreds of innocent kids at risk? I don't know a whole lot about Lukka, but he didn't really seem the type to do that to me.

This definitely feels like a transitionary story, which isn't necessarily bad, but it does feel fairly bland. I wasn't really in love with any of the characters, and the plot wasn't anything I hadn't seen before. All in all, you probably wouldn't miss much if you skipped this one.

[Ben Peters · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of those shorter stories of lore for the MtG sets that I just couldn't really connect with the lore or the set itself. I was hoping reading the background of this set would help but it just came off as a more corny Harry Potter or any other type of Mages in school stories that have been around.