Per Maro the Kenriths where made for/during Eldraine and when Battle Bond came around they wanted to do "Parter with" planeswalkers and picked the Kenriths and introduced them early as part of the twins flavor was they where partners in a battle magics.

I think a similar case is gonna be here, they wanted planeswalkers for a MDFC and its another fun way to show the twins share a spark. Nothing of lore importance happened during Battlebond so Kylem could fit really any point.

It's not even a hard thing to explain considering we already know Kasmina is gathering a group to deal with some existential threat. Liliana is trying to be good and had literally nothing else going on, if Kasmina set her up with a new identity, it's an effective quid pro quo.

Would atually be pretty funny if Liliana was trying to go straight, Kasmina convinced her to do her idea of good, and then ended up being demonized further as she fullfills Kasmina's evil plots.

I'm still unconvinced Kasmina is evil as much as she's extreme.
We don't know what this threat she's so concerned about is, and until we do, I don't think we can weigh in on if her means justify those ends. Like, she doesn't have to be good but the lack thereof in conventional morality doesn't make her evil either.
Didn't we already beat this horse to death in the other thread?
Essentially, nobody in Magic has any grounds to be declaring themselves any moral authority.
... Except maybe Tamiyo.

Still, Liliana would end up looking like "the bad guy".

To not retread old ground, a character can be complex but people in-universe might misunderstand their motives. Like that Return to Ravnica story where a Boros calls Augustin IV "a psychopath", which is a somewhat inaccurate depiction of him.

It's certainly inaccurate to characterize him thusly.
He was a sociopath, not a psychopath.

So that said, to stay on topic, even with liliana doing good, in her own head, I don't think it's ever been a particular bee in her bonnet to have a horrid reputation. In some facets, she celebrates that perception.

Not when everyone's already gunning for her.

But virtually everyone believes she's dead. Everyone gunning for her is essentially nobody at this point.
Kaya, Teyo, Rat, and maybe Jace are the only ones that know she's alive.

We now also got the main teachers spoiled: a dwarf for Lorehold, a musician for Prismari, a dryad for Witherbloom, two merfolk for Quandrix and a WARLOCK aven for whats-its-name.

I think Gavin just said that the Commander deck faces are professors, not that they're the main ones.

Willowdusk is a dryad of unknown age. She was recruited as a Witherbloom professor when students got lost in Detention Bog and she led them back while teaching them botany on the way.
Osgir is "obsessed with relics of the past" and kept getting in trouble as a student for hoarding the best finds. His specialty now is "duplicative restoration".
Zaffai is a musician whose power also effects weather phenomena. Maestro of the Orchestra of the Arcane, an elite extracurricular for the top Prismari students, who always perform outside and fills the skies with elemental magic.
Adrix and Nev teach together and grew up in the mana-rich waters of Pinsari Isles. They could see the patterns of tides and were able to predict a tsunami and save lives.
Breena has a talent of incepting ideas through speech. She backs up her rhetoric with scrolls of ink magic.

In addition, the five student characters:

Zimone of Quandrix: math prodigy whose grandmother was a professor who disappeared
Dina of Witherbloom: blunt dryad with salamander familiar
Rootha of Prismari: perfectionist artist who wants to make her own reputation
Quintorius of Lorehold: loxodon who wants to discover history of his race
Killian of Silverquill: student whose dad is a professor with high expectations of him

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2021-03-29

Some further insights on the nature of the colleges.

Lorehold for example also covers anthropology and psychology. It really is about examining society as a whole, and debating whereas people follow rules or passions.

Quandrix is obviously whereas math is natural or a cosntruct.

Whelp, so far, I love Lorehold, despise the generic school stuff (Pop Quiz? Star Pupil? Really? You don't even have to do anything to have exposure to those kinds of things in real life. Why spend time pretending to be someone who has to do things everyone's basically has already had to do?), and am meh on the Prismari stuff. Prismari is coming off as the generic creatives, which is annoyingly antithetical to me. It doesn't help that the "creativity" is coming off as extremely ego-centric ("This is my vision" or "The world needs to see me shine" vs "This is how the medium is telling me it wants to be expressed" or "The characters developed a voice of their own").

Prismari really do feel like they're going to get out into the real world and immediately get ground to dust under either an inability to earn a living off their "brilliance" or get fired for being primadonnas. They are snowflakes and I'm pretty sure I hate them.

Lorehold, despite myself, I agree I like. Though I think having a loxodon as their main student is... Disjointed.

Star pupil and a lot of the cards like it, I'm actually okay with because I've missed the academic feeling of Tolaria more than I'd realized and some of that feels like coming home in magic.

But overall, I'm still really not liking Strixhaven. Once I see more Silver will, I'll decide if I can beat to buy anything rather than singles.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2021-03-31

New story.

I love how the narrative nearly paints the Oriq sympathetically as victims of a class struggle, then has their Voldemint analogue casually sacrifice them.

As someone who detests every facet of Gideon's death, I don't know what will be worse: having to revisit every Gatewatch character's grief and trauma every time we check in on them or reaching the point in the story where they don't care anymore.

I'm super hoping that he at least stays dead. We had a good long run with Elspeth, but clearly that didn't take.

I'm super conflicted on that because on the one hand, I don't want the story to cheapen death by making it a revolving door (although they have gotten a lot more comfortable making death stick less within a story; see Will and Rowan, Garruk, King Kenrith, Hekara, Niv Mizzet). On the other hand, the way Gideon's arc was handled was...pretty bad, for me at least, and if any character deserved a proper resolution to their story, it's Gideon.

That said, I don't see Liliana finding a way to bring him back. They seemed pretty adamant about this death sticking when War of the Spark came out (they atomized him for good measure). This is just Lili unable to process her grief in a healthy manner because the one person who believed in her to the end, a legitimately good person, sacrificed himself for someone that has lived long past her time, made a pact with demons and an evil Elder Dragon, emotionally abused people to get her way, kills who knows how many people, and didn't care about anyone but herself until maybe ten minutes before they were forced into servitude because of their own hubris.

Is it weird to anyone else that they shoved Will and Rowan into the same College (Prismari) when Will clearly was a better fit for Quandrix with his desire for knowledge? Instead of a fun college romp story where the twins get pulled into different colleges and have to deal with maybe growing a little apart, instead we just jam them both into the school Rowan is good for because "lol, RU Twins go in RU college!"

Make sense to me as the twins are elementalists (ice for Will and lighting for Rowan) and prismari is where elemental magic is taught where, as Quandrix is more about number and druidic magic. Maro said students could have major(s) with classes in different schools so I could see Will majoring/focusing on Prismari for elemental magic but then minor/double major classes from Quandrix.