MTG Strixhaven Post-Mortem, Remastered!
Throwback Thursday presents compiled notes from April 2021
Today we continue our look back at the Magic: the Gathering release post-mortem articles from The Backstage Pass! In some cases the hindsight on this stuff is fairly significant. In other cases, not so much. In other cases, it’s a howl of laughter. Please feel free to amuse yourself at my expense as you read this.
On the Backstage Pass, I stopped writing the rigidly formatted post-mortem articles around the time of the store move to Chandler in 2017. But for many sets, I still wrote debriefing articles on their prerelease/release and market outlook and so forth in much the same way the post-mortems had been set up. I decided here on LGSNI to repurpose those articles as post-mortem Remasters as well, so that I can extend the series all the way to the end of the Pass to where LGSNI took over.
Toward the very end of the Pass, I didn’t even have time to write debriefs about every new set! For articles like this one, I’m compiling notes from my store results, social media, impressions at the time, and the benefit of hindsight. So this is actually kind of a brand new article, disguised as a remaster for consistency’s sake. LGSNI started when Phyrexia All Will Be One was current, so that projects to be the final bridge point.
Normally, we do the original in normal text and my new annotations in italics. Since this article is entirely newly written, we’ll stick to normal text.
Here we go!
In the wake of Kaldheim and then two grand slam Pokemon releases, Shining Fates and Battle Styles, it seemed like game stores could do no wrong. Retail stocks were huge, cryptocurrency was booming, and stimulus checks for $1400 were going out to households (or $600 for individuals) in hope they wouldn’t notice that their household share of the cost of the stimulus was over $29,000. That’s some staggering pork right there. In any case, individuals who didn’t simply spend their $600 on a Playstation 5 or Xbox Series X, fighting the bots the entire way, instead came to their Local Game Store to gamble on their Poke-fortunes and Commander bling. It was into this environment that Strixhaven, a “five enemy pairs” set with a bonus sheet chock full of staple spells, landed to a weirdly mediocre reception.
The elephant in the room was that everybody knew Modern Horizons II was right around the corner and would see the first normal-booster reprints of the enemy fetchlands since 2009’s original Zendikar. Some amount of cannibalization in this respect kept Magic-player dollars away from Strixhaven. Arena had killed paper Standard stone dead by this point as well, which was a bummer inasmuch as the set looked like it would have made a very good Standard environment. In fact, yikes, if it hadn’t been for the eternal format implications of the bonus sheet, look out below.
(Incidentally, I wonder today how badly Strixhaven might have landed if JK Rowling’s political advocacy had already started. Strixhaven is clearly Great Value Hogwarts and this isn’t really anything new to Magic: the Gathering’s IP progression, but at the time that was a neutral thing. Today, not so much.)
We did get a few consequential things from the main Strixhaven set, but it’s thin.
The five rare Snarl lands are the enemy counterparts to the allied reveal-lands from Shadows Over Innistrad: Choked Estuary, Foreboding Ruins, Fortified Village, Game Trail, and Port Town. It’s a Vorthosian blasphemy that the two cycles don’t line up across card naming. Not sure whose decision that was. These are among the weaker “Standard duals” so they could theoretically just remake them with different card titles and not be risking a metagame problem in eternal formats.
The top-valued non-variant main set cards after those are some of the School Dragons (topped by Beledros Witherbloom), Professor Onyx Liliana, and Wandering Archaic, the latter of which is merely a rare and as a double-faced card is less susceptible to reprints than other broadly-playable Commander pieces. Two notable nonrares are Expressive Iteration and Dragon’s Approach. Iteration broke out as the set’s “five-dollar uncommon” early on and lucky for us it was in the promo packs too, because it was strong enough to get itself banned in Pioneer and Legacy. The price settled after that. Dragon’s Approach is red’s “you can put any number of these into a deck” card, a la Relentless Rats, and remains worth a few bucks today even after a List printing.
The Mystical Archives bonus sheet was the real lede for Strixhaven, headlined by bangers like Demonic Tutor, Teferi’s Protection, Time Warp, Natural Order, Tainted Pact, and midlist standouts like Dark Ritual, Brainstorm, and Lightning Bolt. For stores, this was a home run, because many of these cards are always in demand across multiple formats and no amount of stock for them is ever too many.
As an added bonus, Japanese alternate-art versions of the bonus cards appeared, and amazing-looking ones like the Demonic Tutor continue to be expensive gets to this day. Main-set Japanese-language Strixhaven cards are a new level of worthless, however, owing to packs opened in the frenzied chase for the top hits. War of the Spark history repeated itself for sure.
Etched foils had debuted in Commander Legends and did not appear in Kaldheim, so Strixhaven became their second appearance in Magic and their first in a Standard set. And for all that, they hardly should have bothered. On the English bonus sheet cards, the etching was just a metallic highlight of some of the gold frame elements, sufficiently difficult to discern that it was easy to pass them by and mis-sort the cards. On the Japanese alt-art cards, the etching was just text-box framing! It was almost nothing at all! This also led to a weird chase where traditional foil versions of alt-art cards were highly sought, and then specific factory printings of them were sought, since alt-arts from the Japanese-language boxes had discernibly different foiling than alt-arts from the American set boxes. I know this sounds confusing as all hell but I promise you I am actually simplifying and understating the mess here.
In any event, Wizards of the Coast learned what they needed to learn from the minimalist application of the etching treatment, and etched cards ever after have looked much better and have been far more in line with what we saw in Commander Legends.
One last aside here from the logistics standpoint: It was reasonably difficult for staff to handle the triage, ingestion, pick/pull, and fulfillment of orders for the Japanese alt-art cards from the bonus sheet. We had to hang up pages with the card art and the English card name for each. Hat tip to Josh Fohrman of the Game On chain of stores for distributing one of the first such guide sheets for stores to use in our singles departments.
The sparsity of Strixhaven’s main set impacts the aftermarket for sealed boxes in a meaningful way. Like Kaldheim, Strixhaven had draft booster boxes on mega-blowout online for significantly under wholesale throughout 2022 and 2023. Unlike Kaldheim, Strixhaven’s draft booster boxes still have yet to recover in the market, easily available across multiple vendors in the $90 range or less, as of this writing. The set had a fun limited environment, so this might not be the worst box to pick up if you’re looking to throw it in the closet until game night with your friends in 2027.
Set and Collector boxes are similarly undervalued today, if not quite as badly. It seems like the collector boxes would be a decent get, if you could understand what the hell was in them, as shown in the following graphic:
Strixhaven continued the “spring set” pattern we saw starting with Ikoria and continuing into New Capenna and March of the Machine of having five different Commander decks. In this case each one matched a school, and thus one of the five enemy-color pairings. There is always variation in terms of which ones are most popular, but Strixhaven’s imbalance-of-power was the inverted kind, where one deck was wanted far less than the other four, the red-blue one if memory serves. It thus became clearance blowout fodder. Beyond that, no real complaints.
Strixhaven today is a set that kind of gets lost in the shuffle of the post-pandemic Magic overprinting run. Nobody is really going to be hurting for any card in this set for years to come — even the biggest gets from the bonus sheet are by definition already reprints. Years ahead, we’ll know if any cards have risen to prominence that have dodged reprints, and those will be something to flip for a hot minute until they, too, appear in some manner of Mystery List Guest Masters. It’s the circle of life, and zebras are dancing. Embrace it.
Next up on Throwback Thursday, a former best-selling-Magic-product-ever, Modern Horizons II! And yes it was pushed and yes it absolutely made waves across all the formats. Except Standard, I suppose. Easy to forget a format like Standard, all tucked away down there.