So ... There are a lot of cards this set that I just detest. Possibly with more passion than ever before. As much as I hate the goofball, school heavy references, it's not that I hate the lighter cards or the school cards separately. It's only when they overlap that I find them disagreeable.

However, I do feel it would be very unfair of me to sit here and be negative because there are cards I legitimately like as well.

So! I think it would be cathartic for us all to kvetch about the cards we don't like, but in doing so, you have to name a card you do like.

I HATE strixhaven stadium and everything to do with that Quiditch-like game.

Some of the 'funny' puns are really grating to me, like Honor Troll. Others like Hall Monitor bring back some of the whimsy that i like..i just think they overdid it. There is a fine line between how much whimsy and general school-related stuff is ok and i think they've crossed that line on step too far.

I really like how grounded the world feels and how good the worldbuilding overal feels, particular in comparison to Eldraine and (my personal worst set ever by a really large margin) Ikoria.

I love the design of most of the Elder Dragons, though at the same time i hate the lack of info on them...we only know the pronoun of one!

I absolutely adore Lorehold and the revamp for Boros as a color and i also appreciate the lifegain subtheme for Golgari..finally something else for that color besides endless graveyard recursion.

My favorite card in the set....from a flavor standpoint i really love Gyome, Master Chef. It's whimsical, but not overly so and it opens up some nicely flavorful deckbuilding opportunities. The abilities are also super flavorful. I'm absolutely going to build a commander deck for him.

Overall though i have to say that I like Archavios a lot more than I initially thought i would. I think there is a lot to like here and they put more effort into it than the last few sets.

I don't understand why people keep comparing Mage Tower to quidditch. The only thing they have in common is that they are sports played at magic schools. But here's the thing. If Harry Potter didn't exists, and no one had ever heard of quidditch, and you were creating a fantasy version of the American college experience, would you not have put some kind of sports in there? And would Mage Tower not be a reasonable way to fill that expectation?

It's not just a sport played at a magic school, it is the dominant sport played between the different groupings of the same school. I don't know America, but I don't believe they generally have handegg tournaments between the STEM and art students.

But that is a hypothetical. Harry Potter does exist, in a BIG way, so naturally everybody looks at Strixhaven through a Harry Potter microscope. I personally like the school in Kingkiller Chronicles a LOT better, but though I'm not particularly fond of HP, i think they did the different 'houses' theme quite well and distinct in Strixhaven, very different from HP. Mage Tower though..... But that is just my opinion. I'm glad that you like it!

Concept wise I love Lorehold and Quandrix because they really push the boundaries of what their color combinations can be about.

Let me put it this way: I don't think it's at all obvious that a renowned magical academy in Magic's multiverse should be a fantasy version of the American college experience. In fact, I think it's a terrible idea that crosses the line into silver-border parody set territory. So no, I wouldn't have put it in, not even because it might be too similar to Harry Potter, but because it's too close to the real world and thus "too meta". I dislike it for pretty much the same reasons that I dislike Kylem. And looking at the art on Strixhaven Stadium in particular, I'd argue it just looks way to similar to a real life sports stadium. Much of the art direction for Strixhaven feels like they just took a bunch of wannabe architects, fashion designers and hair stylists that wanted to try out some of their real world designs rather than proper fantasy concept artists. Sometimes it's very subtle, but it's there, and it's jarring. Heck, maybe the inclusion of some kind of magical sport might even have worked if they'd managed to make it look like it belongs in this fantasy universe, but not like this.


There isn't much about Strixhaven that I like, but some individual pieces of art are kinda cool...

Ingenious Mastery for making an astrolabe out of water.

Kelpie Guide might be my favourite actually. Very elegant, majestic and magical in the best way, especially since it depicts a creature from actual folklore that we don't often see in Magic. The landscape is gorgeous and otherworldly.

Eyetwitch is pretty hilarious.

Hunt for Specimens and similar pieces of art. Witherbloom is the least stupid-looking of the colleges in my opinion. Not that that's saying much...

Poet's Quill also has cool art, but I'd argue that they completely missed the point of poetry by putting this card into black...

Springmane Cervin is basically in the same camp as Kelpie Guide. Beautiful, majestic and uplifting but not silly or "childish", which is a big difference.

Aether Helix looks kinda cool.

Can we have a reprint of Excavated Wall with new Dominaria-related art and flavour text? Pretty please? I'm sure you could put a great card reference or other easter egg in there.

Personally, one of my biggest problems with Strixhaven can be summed up with detention vortex. Because they don't bloody give detention in college. They seem to have lost the plot pretty hard that this is supposed to be a set of colleges and not k-12, though good on them, at least, for not making horrible jokes about elementary school, particularly with elemental school right there. All the same, I view it as a major problem that this seemingly devolved into whatever school reference they could think of instead of treating them as places of higher learning.

Though I still have no idea what the practical point of the prismari is. Sure, artists exist, but I seriously question the demand the world has for elemental summoning drama queens.

On the flip side, two of the cards I really like are star pupil and eager first-year. I feel like these are decent school cards.

And because I earned the credit to bitch about another card just there, I despise divide by zero.
Though I also largely agree, magic sports ball and everything to do with it is awful.

I think it's all but stated that these are the Arcavios equivalent of the special effects people and animators.

Plus, art colleges have to exist in some capacity.

Strixhaven was largely a miss for me in the same way that Battlebond was largely a miss. It's weird, I kind of like the Kenrith twins and am the one person here who unironically enjoyed Eldraine, but it seems like every time they show up in something else it goes hard for the candy-coated goof. And I'm fine with some Goof in M:tG; the problem is that I want it to be integrated into something that feels more solid and serious. Beebles in Tolaria, they were fine in my opinion. The Beebles weren't Tolaria. Tolaria was a mage academy done right and with dignity, but as a little worldbuilding element it had its own small grace note of sillyness and in-character annoyance. The best humor moments in M:tG have kind of the tone of the humor in WHFB; a farcical silver lining to something that's both dark and strange.

Strixhaven's biggest problem is that it feels like the "Theme Park Version" of its concept. It's not an awesome mage school like Tolaria (which basically represented a fifth or more of Urza's block), it's Epcot Mage School World. This has been something of a problem in Magic for a long time, and the move away from blocks to solo sets has, frankly, made it steadily worse. Most of these planes COULD work... if they had the time and space that older planes did in order to get their concept across. Let's compare and contrast Strixhaven with something generally seen as good, Ravnica 1.0. In Strixhaven, basically everything is dedicated to a college of the mage school on a wider plane. We have one set, even if it's a large set, to touch every concept needed to build up this corner of the world, and they try hard to get out every trope needed for the wizard school theme. On the other hand, Ravnica -- and I know, it's a world I've been highly critical of -- like Strixhaven has these color-locked organizations but it had three sets and developed not only the Guilds but also more of the world. To an extent this is something that bugged me in the later Ravnica sets, that the world felt (like strixhaven) much less broad because unlike the first block, there wasn't a lot of in-theme neutral

Which brings me to Mage Tower. I think that there was some good effort put into designing the game to not be Quidditch, and in that way I very much agree with Aaarrrgh. And even fancy colleges have some games like this; I was reminded, somewhat, of the Eton Wall Game. The thing is (and why I agree with the distaste for it even if not the particular complaint), Theme Park Version. Rather than a quaint tradition like the Wall Game, it's a big sporting event with a big stadium reminiscent of Battlebond and American Football. What should have been a grace note referenced obliquely in one or two cards and maybe represented by one to show that people are people and can have interests that aren't pure arcane study was instead turned into a spectacle headlining the trope.

I like Strixhavens flavor a lot, I thought the college seems well developed with room to add more stuff we might on have seen, 4/5 of them do stuff different game play wise than ravnica (and in a enemy colored spell matter set I can't see how UR wouldn't focus on spells), a wide range of races you don't find as much in normal magic. Thought I will we just more info on the races and elder dragons.

I'm also not really seeing much of the Harry Potter stuff outside the tropes (magical) schools both Rowling and Mtg. Seems similar imo to people saying how Disney Eldraine was.

[quote="Barinellos"]Though I still have no idea what the practical point of the prismari is. Sure, artists exist, but I seriously question the demand the world has for elemental summoning drama queens./quote]

I mean they are basically benders from avatar who dance or sing instead of doing martial art movements*, plenty of practical things as well as what art bring to a society as well as the huge well of thing you can use art for magic wise.

*which i mean performance fighting is a thing i could see a few prismari monks.

What's wrong with Ikoria?

I always forget that sports are such a big deal in America. Nobody in any of the schools I went to was physically capable of caring much less about school sports. I think it's mostly an American thing. I've never heard of any prominent school sports anywhere else.

For me personally almost everything.

The worldbuilding feels waferthin. To me it feels hollow and shallow. The story was subpar, but the characters in it range from actively dislikable (Lukka and general Kudro) to uniteresting (Jirina and Vivien). I love Narset, but she is only in the set to even out the colors of planeswalkers, which i find very jarring. It also didn't help that the story on the cards was a completely different story for the one told in the novel.

The Kaiju flavor we were promised didn't translate (with a few exceptions) to the main set, which offered shockingly little in actual huge monsters. I absolutely loath the IP crossing with the Godzilla cards, as i do all IP crossings, because it feels like a vote of no confidence from Wizards in the strenght of it's own IP. I HATE having to play against a King Ghidorah commander deck to the point where I almost don't want to play.

Card naming was not really great either; Brokkos, Apex of Forever is one of the worst cardnames i've ever read.

The artdirection is not to my taste, there are relatively few pieces that are noteworthy to me, while the sets that came right before and after it contained more steller work. That's not to say that the artwork is bad, but the particular artstyle chosen doesn't suite my personal tastes.

But the final nail in it's coffin for me is that none of it feels coherent....it all just feels like a bunch of halfbaked ideas thrown together. I can't really put my finger on the feeling or explain it any better.

Of course this is all highly subjective; it are just my personal feelings.

For the record, it's a feeling I share, but I end up banking hard in the opposite direction emotionally. I like just enough of Ikoria that it drives me up the wall at how I feel it didn't work. It makes me, nay COMPELS me, to puzzle out how to fix it. I've nearly started a thread with that exact project in mind multiple times, trying to harvest parts from Zendikar, Ixalan, Alara, and who knows what else to stitch into Ikoria until it works.

So... I've been weighing how I can offset my next batch of dislikes, but I unfortunately haven't come up with anything.

There are a host of the legendaries that I vehemently hate.
I don't think much of anyone will disagree that codie is among the worst things magic has ever used ink to print. I rank this abomination along with sash and waistcoat.

I don't like quintorius. My problem with him is just a cognitive dissonance. Elephants aren't nimble, I just can't get my brain to square up with what I'm seeing on that card.

And honestly, I understand if this one is going to be controversial but I loathe everything about zimone. I hate she's a child, I hate she's a prodigy, I hate those stupid stereotypical smart comically oversized glasses, I hate the base appeal to manipulate my emotions with her demeanor. I already hated any time they've put a child on a card and nothing at all has changed

Aw, but Quint is great in his story.

Codie is the worst. I can't believe that that made it to print or that anyone thought that it was a good idea. Dont forget to put Rat on that list though!

Also really love Quint, both as a character and his story. But as a historian i'm a bit biased.

Yeah, I honestly don't want to dislike him so much, I just honestly can't deal with the art. It's not even bad art, it's just deep deep in the uncanny for me.

What other legendaries do you dislike?