We’re very much still in the midst of Strixhaven spoilers, but if there’s one thing that’s becoming clear, it’s that Stixhaven is a school that teaches options.
We’ve had a lot of MDFC of late, and they’re all great and all, but Strixhaven looks to be taking things to the next level when it comes to giving you an army of tools to use.
There are lots of benefits to this, and it feels like a fun theme that seems to be woven throughout the cards.
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Make your decision
The first taste of this whole thing we got was the fact that we’re getting another cycle of Command cards. These are very much the quintessential examples of what options you can have on a single card.
Just look at Quandrix Command, for example, which for three mana, allows you to choose two of the four options, with the options being bouncing a Creature or Planeswalker, countering an Artifact or Enchantment, putting two +1/+1 counters on a Creature, or putting cards from a graveyard back in a library.
Then you’ve got the Dean cycle, where you’ve got two Legendary Creatures on one card, but both in different colors.
All of these allow you to have more than 60 cards in a 60 card deck, and that allows for a lot of creativity along with inspiring people to be a bit more adventurous with their card and deck construction. Generally speaking, creativity thrives on limitations, especially in MTG, but having all of these options within your options allows for a lot of fun.
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We’ve got more options
It’s not just these either, the learn mechanic is one of the most option heavy things around. Learn allows you to either discard a card to draw a card, or reveal a Lesson card from outside of the game and put it into your hand.
That’s already a nice bit of flexibility, but then you’ve got the lessons themselves, which are quite often colorless cards that bend the color pie a little bit. This means that you can gain access to things outside of your chosen colors, and that’s really interesting.
With all of these things at your fingertips, you can fit two decks worth of options into one deck, without really having to compromise.
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Then there’s Multiple Choice
This is all good stuff, and we love choices. In fact, of all the choices presented by Strixhaven: School of Mages, the one that’s really caught our eye is a little card called Multiple Choice.
Now, we don’t think this is the most powerful card in the set, not at all, but it’s certainly an interesting one, and we feel as though it perfectly represents the number of choices available in this school.
Multiple Choice costs X and one Blue. If X is 1, you scry 1 and draw a card, if X is 2, you can choose a player, then they have to return a Creature they control to its owner’s hand, if X is 3, you create a 4/4 Blue and Red Elemental token, and if X is four or more, you get to do all of those things.
Now, ignoring the fact that paying more than four for X is a bad investment, look at all of those options. There’s no doubt that the best cost for this card is five mana, but having the option to spend less just to make sure you can do something is definitely worthwhile.
None of the abilities is exceptional on their own, but getting all of them for five mana seems absurd. We’re looking forward to messing around with Multiple Choice, but we’re also very excited to see what other choices face us with the rest of the set.
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