Magic just revealed 47 new Strixhaven cards (including a ridiculously powerful planeswalker)

When the Phyrexian invasion hit Arcavios in the 2023 March of the Machine storyline, students at the magical school of Strixhaven had to cast a desperate spell — the Invocation of the Founders — to save the school and their plane. The spell obliterated the biomechanical invaders but left Strixhaven in ruins. Magic: The Gathering’s latest set, Secrets of Strixhaven, picks up at least two years later. The magical university has been rebuilt with new professors and new students, but some of those scars haven’t fully healed.

“We are going to be exploring both the campus and the school as well as beyond it to really give a sense of more of what's going on on this plane and kind of get a glimpse at some of the aftermath of the events of March of the Machine and the Phyrexian invasion,” narrative lead Lauren Bond said during a press preview for the set.

Like 2021’s Strixhaven: School of Mages, the new set puts a lot of emphasis on the university’s five colleges. Each is governed by two Magic colors and focuses on a specific kind of magic:

• Lorehold (red-white) students wield archaemancy as magical archaeologists of a sort.
• Prismari (blue-red) emphasizes magical art through the use of elements
• Quandrix (green-blue) students wield mathematical magic
• Silverquill (white-black) specializes in verbal magic
• Witherbloom (black-green) is full of nature mages.

These dynamics carry into the cards themselves. Whereas Strixhaven: School of Mages learned heavily on Lessons and its accompanying Learn mechanic, Secrets of Strixhaven explores quite a few new mechanics. Each specific college gets its own named mechanic (more on those later), but largely every card in the set emphasizes the characteristics that define these styles of magic. Even the dual lands featured represent specific locations relevant to each college. The entire set is all about wizards, druids, warlocks, and mages honing their craft — but even more importantly about the various kinds of spells they cast.

Elder Dragons and Planeswalkers

Strixhaven was founded by five elder dragons that lend their names to each of the five colleges. Sure enough, they’re all back in Secrets of Strixhaven as some of the most powerful cards in the entire set.

“They very much represent and embody the core ideal of each school, which really revolves around that tension between the two colors of mana within the school,” Bond said.

Another batch of college-specific cards featured in the set are the mascots for each school. These were featured mainly as tokens in previous sets, but in Secrets of Strixhaven they’re spotlighted as full-on creatures. These magical summons function as familiars for the students.

Secrets of Strixhaven will also feature two planeswalker cards who are both new professors at the school. Ral Zarek, Guest Lecturer is pure black and costs three mana to cast who surveils, causes any number of players to discard a card, and returns a cheap creature from the graveyard to the battlefield. None of that is too flashy, but his ultimate ability sees you flip five coins. For every coin that lands heads, target opponent skips that number of turns. In other words, he’s going to ruin somebody’s night. (For the lorehounds, Zarek featured prominently in a recent short story.)

Professor Dellian Fel is a teacher in the Witherbloom college, so he’s a black-green planeswalker who juggles the push and pull of gaining and losing life while helping you draw cards. He can also destroy a target creature outright. His ultimate gives you an emblem that drains opponents whenever you gain life — a deceptively simple effect that can spiral into devastating combos. Fel features prominently in the recent slate of Magic short stories where he’s positioned as a scary and potentially dangerous professor who says ominous poeticisms like, “The borders between life and death are as thin as the petals upon the water.” Those short stories also explain how something is awry with the Archaics, bizarre and monstrous giants native to the plane of Arcavios seemingly capable of warping reality (two Archaic cards are featured above alongside the planeswalker variants).

Secrets of Strixhaven also has a number of cards that just reference the difficulties of being a student. Take Procrastinate, a card that shows a sleepy frog passed out mid-assignment It’s part of a broader effort to make Strixhaven feel grounded, even as its students wield world-altering magic.

“We really looked for relatable moments,” Bond said. “This is equally a set of cool, epic magic…and also, they’re still students.”

But beyond the flavor, Secrets of Strixhaven is also introducing one of its most ambitious mechanical ideas.

Prepared: creatures that cast spells

The set’s headline mechanic is called prepare, and it fundamentally changes how spells work in Magic. Cards with prepare are creatures first, but they also come with a built-in spell attached. When that creature becomes “prepared,” it creates a copy of that spell that you can cast.

“What if a creature could cast some of these iconic spells from Magic’s history?” executive producer Athena Froehlich said during the preview.

Many of these spells are indeed pulled directly from Magic history. Some are familiar staples like Rampant Growth, while others are much more powerful callbacks, including effects inspired by cards like Ancestral Recall and Reanimate.

Each college gets its own mechanic

Unlike the original Strixhaven set — which leaned on shared mechanics — Secrets of Strixhaven gives each college its own gameplay identity.

• Silverquill rewards targeting creatures with spells through a mechanic called Repartee
• Prismari scales up big, flashy spells with Opus
• Witherbloom cares about life gain through Infusion
• Lorehold brings back Flashback for graveyard recursion
• Quandrix uses Increment to grow creatures based on how much mana you spend

The result is a set where the five colleges feel more mechanically distinct — even though they’re still united by a broader focus on instants and sorceries.

Another new mechanic, Paradigm, brings back the “lesson” subtype from the original Strixhaven, but with a twist. Instead of fetching lessons from outside the game, paradigm spells stick around. Once you cast one, it gets exiled and then lets you cast a copy of it for free at the start of future turns.

It’s meant to represent the kind of foundational knowledge you carry with you after graduation. But it’s less about cramming for a test, and more about applying what you’ve learned again and again.

Magic’s Mystical Archive returns

Strixhaven’s signature bonus sheet, the Mystical Archive, is also back. Once again, it’s going to be one of the set’s biggest draws. Each Secrets of Strixhaven booster pack includes at least one Mystical Archive card, featuring instant and sorcery spells pulled from across Magic’s history.

There are 65 total cards in the Archive, spanning uncommon to mythic rarity, along with special Japanese alternate-art versions and new foil treatments aimed at collectors. Here's a look at seven of them along with their Japanese alt-art versions:

Taken together, Secrets of Strixhaven feels like a set about transition. It’s about a school rebuilding after a disaster. But it’s also about a game experimenting with new ways to reinterpret its own history, whether that’s through mechanics like prepare or by literally embedding classic spells into new cards.

Strixhaven may be back in session. But it’s not quite the same school it was before.