Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1329: Secrets of Strixhaven Design

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

In this podcast, I talk about the design of Secrets of Strixhaven.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to rather drive to work. Hello, everyone. And today, we're going to talk about the secrets of Strick-Shaven. So, let's start from the very beginning. So before we can get to the secrets of Strick-Saven, we need to talk a little bit about Strick-Saven.

So Strick-Saven was the result of a lot of different things all coming together. I'd been trying for a while. to do an enemy-colored faction set. Both Dragon's Tarkier and Unstable had tried to be and ended up being an ally set for different reasons. We talked about... Jenna Helen and I talk about doing magical school... Magical school genre,

something we had discussed. Aaron and I talked about doing an incident and sorcery only set. I have been trying to find a home to do double-faced cards, the modal double-faced cards. So there were a lot of different things we were trying to do that I kind of coalesced into one idea, which ended up being Strickshaven. Strick's Haven did very well.

It had, so it had introduced magecraft, which is things that trigger one of you, cast or copy of incident or sorcery. It had lesson and learn, which were lesson was a mechanic to let you go fetch instance and sorcery, specific instance sorceries. Spells with the, or sorry,

spells with these subtype lesson in them when you cast them. And we have the double-face cards, some of which were a spell on one side and a permanent other side, some of which were the deans of the schools. There were two deans of the schools. One of the ideas of the factions in Strick-Saving

is instead of celebrating what they have in common, like the guilds do, they were more about the conflict between the sides. And so the school had two deans, one for each color, representing the different conflicts. in the school was the idea. Anyway, Strick-Shaven went on to be very, very successful.

Oh, Strictzhen also did what we call the Mystic Archive bonus sheet, where it was instance and sorceries, all done with a special new art style. And the idea was it represented that because this was a school of magic that they'd studied all across the multiverse, all the different spells, and they collected them in one place. That's the Mystical Archive. Anyway, the set went on to be very, very popular. In fact, it was the best-selling.

in multiverse premiere set ever at the time. I mean, things have passed it since then, but it did very well. People really liked it. So we decided we would return. And normally, when we go back, so if we go to a place that's popular,

kind of the minimum before we'll return is about five years. That's about as quick as we want to return to something. And even then, we don't always return that fast, obviously. but that is kind of the quickest end. So this is us at five years. Shricks haven't did really well, people really liked it.

We decided to go back. So first and foremost, whenever you do a return, there's a spectrum on returns. On one end, I will say, maybe call something like Champions of Kamagawa, where you do a lot of reinventing. You know, Kamagawa Neandina, I guess Chimbska Gawa was the original.

Kamagawa Neand Dynasty was the return. And while there is some, I mean, there's some nods to the original one. Mechanically, it's mostly new. Ninjitsu come back, and I guess channel technically came back, but mostly it was new mechanically, and creatively, maybe half the set was referencing old stuff, but half was brand new things that were never there before.

So that is really a set where it's a revisit, but it's really reinventing itself. And then the other end of spectrum also, like, return to Rabnika, where it was basically what you'd seen before. We didn't really change much of anything. The guild structure is there, you know, we gave you some new mechanics, but it, you know, it really is the world you just visited. So that's kind of the spectrum from, are we just revisiting and, you know, changing things up just a little tiny bit? Or are we really restructuring things and changing things a lot?

Lorwin Eclipse was kind of in the middle. Obviously, original Lorwyn and Shadermore were separate. We brought them together, so that was kind of different. So there's elements of it that were not in the original. But there's a lot of, you know, we did bring back mechanics. So, anyway, that is sort of where we fall in. And secrets of strict saving was always going to be on the return to Ravnik aside. We're like, we're going back, we're going to see the schools, we're going to see the enemy factions,

we're going to be instances and sorceries, like we're not reinventing the wheel. Now, Strick-Savon is the name of the school. It takes place on Arcavios, is the name of the plane. We had not seen much of our archavios. We were really on the school. We decided at this time we'd maybe venture a little farther outside the school, though it is still school-centric. It is called Secretsch-Savent.

It is still about the school. But we are broadening a little bit. Maybe one day we'll do a set that's about our cave-as that isn't really about Strick-Savon. That is not secrets-strict-savent, since obviously the word strict-savent isn't the title. Maybe one day we'll do that. That is not what this is.

Okay, so when we're talking about coming back, we had to sort of look at all the things we had done before, And so we had to say, okay, so we put them in three buckets. Like, we definitely have to do this. Maybe we should do this. We should not do this. So first and foremost, the factions. Enme color school factions based around school subjects.

And, oh, for one of my favorite things, one of my big contributions, I felt district saving. I mean, I led to design in district saving, division design, was the idea that, A lot of times in the genre, when you go, you see musical, magical school stuff, like all the classes they study are like magic, you know, potions and stuff like that. I like to the idea that in our school you study actual subjects. You study math and history and science. You know, maybe the means by which you do that is through magic.

Like the way I describe it as well, history is a little bit different if you can raise spirits from the dead and talk to them about their life. That's a very different way to study history, a magical way to study history. but the idea that the schools are rooted in actual things that you and I had to go study in school. So obviously the schools had to come back. It's the core of what Strick-Saving is. So that was absolutely. That was definitely had to do again.

The other thing that was a clear slam-dump absolute was the idea of an instant sorcery set. We have a bunch of, we've had artifact sets, enchantment sets, land sets. But really, strict-saving is kind of the only world known specifically, for doing artifacts, not artifacts, for doing instance and sorceries. And the reason for that, and we'll get into this as we talk about what we needed the set to do, one of the big challenges of instance and sorceries is that you need to have a certain ASFAN to care about something. AsFan is R&D slang for those that somehow don't know this I've talked about all the time. Just talks about when you fan the cards.

AsFan stands for as-fanned. If you fan the cards, how many cards in each booster pack on every? have the thing you care about. And the key is you need to have enough things. In order to care about it mechanically, the asphan needs to be high enough. And normally, I'll just take Sealed,

because it's simpler to explain. In Sealed, you tend to play 16 creatures, seven spells, and 17 land. On average, that's the default sort of playing style. That means you only have seven cards that aren't creatures,

and some of those might be artifacts or enchantments. So, like, it's just not... Even if all of those were incidents and sorceries, that's still kind of pushing the boundaries. Now, when we do artifact sets or enchantment sets, we can make creatures that are artifacts or enchantments. So, anyway, it's a challenge. So one of the ways we do that,

sort of the closest we have to making an artifact creature or enchantment creature is token creatures. The reason that's the case is you can make instance and sorceries that make creatures. They can make tokens. And so that's a way for you to get cards that go into your creature slots that count toward your as fan of instances and sorceries. So that is something we talked about very early on.

We were pretty sure we were going to do it. You really need to have creatures that you can sort of up your as-fan. And so that was one of the ways to do it. It wasn't a, like we knew, for sure we were doing the schools and the instant sorcery matters. The mascots, the tokens, we were pretty sure we're going to do, but we're not 100%. And what we ended up deciding to do with those was to bring them back, but we changed them up a bit. I'll get to that a little later. Okay, next, we looked at, oh, the mystical archive.

We were pretty sure we wanted to bring back to the mystical archive. It was super popular. So it's the kind of thing we need to talk to the architect about. Vision design is not the BL Endol of Bonnachites. We are involved because it impacts on the set of structure and put together. but there's a little bit of buy-off on bonus sheets that we need to get buy in. Everybody was pretty up on the idea of bonus sheets, so we realized pretty early on we were going to do another mystical archive.

Okay, let's walk through the mechanics. So first was Magecraft. We knew that we needed instant sorceress matter, and there's two parts to making instant sorcerers matter. Part number one is you need cards that just care that you're casting instance and sorceries. Magecraft did that in the first set. And the interesting thing about trying to care about instant sorceries is, unlike creatures or just permanence in general,

like creatures are on the board and they attack and block and you can activate them. And there's lots of things you can do with a creature. Spells, well, you cast them, they resolve, they go to the graveyard. That's what they do. So, Maytref said, well, we're just going to care about playing them. That's the main thing you do with instance sorcerers as you play them. So we decided in vision design that we were going to do magecraft. did this seem like the cleanest, easiest way to do it.

Oh, another important thing I should bring out. One of the things we did, and we put together, the original Strix Haven, was I really wanted to demonstrate there were different ways to do faction sets. Obviously, we'd done Ravnika. Ravnika had been very popular. We'd done Ravnika. In fact, we had done Gilds of Ravnika. We'd been to Ravnika many, many times. But I was interested in demonstrating different ways of doing factions.

Like, I really wanted to do an enemy faction set. So the idea we played around with, or we did, I guess not even played around, we did, was the idea that instead of each faction having its own keyword, which is kind of the normal way we do faction. I said, what if all the factions run across all of the set, like all of the factions, what if the keywords run across all the factions? So the idea is we have magecraft and everybody's magecraft, but, oh, well, Silverquell is more about combat, so they have cheaper. You know, they have, their magecraft are things that want you to play a lot of, a lot of cards in one turn. Where Prismar is about casting big spells. So, the way they play the magecraft is they want things that are not going to be repeated or you don't want to do it twice in one turn. You want to do it once.

And so it's more about playing one spell or turn and building up. So the idea is that we could do magecraft but have each school sort of play a little bit differently with how it uses it. So that the way you would see how the factions work is how do they handle the same thing. So in that, in strict saving, we didn't do, we didn't do faction keywords. That's important. We'll get to that second. Anyway, vision design decided we're going to follow the same pattern. We were going to make mechanics that ran through all the guild.

So we decided to bring back magecraft. We looked at lesson and learn. So one of the things you need is cards that care by instant sorceries. The other thing you need is at least one way or more than one way to up the ascent sorceries. One of those was token creatures, which we decided, we decided in vision design we were going to do. The second is lesson learned was in the last set. So lesson learned are cards often permanent, although not all of them are permits, I believe, but usually they were permanent that said, oh, I also come with an instant or sorcery. You got to go get from outside

the game. So essentially, it just up with the number of instant sorcerers you got because there were permanence that came with instant sorceries. And so, that's what we did. Lesson to learn was actually, we originally done something called Inventions in, original Kaladesh. And the idea was the cards you got were little small artifacts. Inventions was too much to do with energy.

Energy was a big ask. So we ended up cutting that in the beginning of development. And so we've been holding on to that. Yanni, who led strict saving design, really decided that he thought changing that over to instance and sources was really interesting. It actually played a little bit better than it did with artifacts.

So anyway, we ended up doing lesson learned. We talked about lesson learned. So first and foremost, we knew that Avatarvalless Airbender was going to be using lessons. No learn but lessons. So we talked a little bit about did we want learn? Did we want lessons? In the end, we decided we didn't want

learn that there are other, we wanted to find some other ways to, to solve this problem. We weren't sure about lessons. Lessons was a question. If we said maybe we'll have lessons. The other thing we did in original strip saving was double face cards, modal double faith cards. In fact, strict saving was originally the place we were going to premiere modal double face cards. But when we did, I had to do a little playtesting mini team. And when I did that, I was so enamored by them, I ended up putting them in all three sets of that magic gear. So they were in

the Zendikar and Kahlthheim Zendikar Rising Kaltheim and Shrik Saving. And each set kind of used them a little bit differently. The way that we, like I said, the way we use them in Shrik savings, A, some of them were spells on one

side and permanent on the other side, which we can't do with like split cards. And the other was the Deans, where they were... Oh, and we also had, the twins were at the school. the twins were at the school, and so we did one on each side, Rowan and Will, or the twins, sorry. Okay, so we decided we did not need double-faced cards.

In fact, probably the one of the least popular. I think one of the problems in Strick-Saving is because we've been ramping up, like we did the simplest version in Zemakar Rising with the lands. The Deans, for example, were a little too much. They were pretty complicated at both sides, and it was hard to remember what both sides were. I think if we had stuck to simple, simple, permanent on one side, simple spell on the other side, they would have gone a little bit better.

But anyway, we decided we didn't need them. It wasn't something that was of the things we had done first time around. We felt like, look, we have to make space for new things. We felt we could leave that out. Okay, so one of the big questions was, if lesson learned isn't solving the problem, how do we solve the problem of getting your ass fan up of incidents and sorceries? So, it turns out, there was something that we did in original Strick's Haven that we didn't end up putting in the set, or didn't end up making it to the set.

They were called scrolls. So scrolls were, and in the original strict saving, I think they were pitched as a token. And the idea was scrolls held within them in instant or sorcery. Some of which were predisposed. Like, this scroll comes with this spell. And some of which were, you could sort of choose a spell from your hand or from the graveyard. Like, you could sort of imprinted, essentially.

And we ended up not having space for it. But when I did the write-up, I do my vision design handoff in my article. So whenever I'm leading a vision design, I will post my vision design document. So you can see what I wrote up when I handed the set over. So anyway, when I handed over strict saving, I talked about scrolls. We actually handed over scrolls. They didn't end up getting used. But one of the things I said in my documents, because I do an annotation.

As I said, of all the things that got cut in Strick Saving, this was the one I was saddest to see Go. There's something really cool about it, and I would love to find a future home for it. So when we were doing exploratory design for Strict Save, and I brought back the idea of the scrolls. The idea of sort of embedded, embedded instance and sorceries that you could cast that actually count as instance and sorceries

because that was a neat way to up your fan. So when we explored with it in torture design, we started looking at, instead of putting them on tokens, What if we just made cards? Kind of like Adventure. Adventure is a spell that has a second card embedded in it. Now, for Adventure, you have to cast that spell first, and then you can cast the permanent.

But what if we reversed it? What if it was a card that was a permanent, but it came embedded or prepared with this spell? Originally, they all just came with the spell, and then eventually as we played around with it, we learned that having some that you didn't automatically get it, that you had to do something to prepare the spell. They had to jump through a hoop to get it.

And that you could reach, once you cast the spell, you could jump through the hoop again to get it. We thought that was pretty fun and expanded what we could do. The other thing we tried in Vision, so we did that exploratory, the Envision really liked it and started flushing it out in Vision. For a while, we were trying to see if we could execute on the idea that

all the spells were existing magic spells. We thought there was a real cool flavor of that. This is the school. They studied the mystical archive. Oh, by the way, I think the scrolls in the original set were one of the things that helped inspire the idea of the mystical archive sheet because a lot of the scrolls had classic spells in them and this idea that, oh, they collect the classic spells of magic.

There are other things that led to the mystical archive, a little tiny bit maybe that led to that. Anyway, so we were trying to see if we could just get away with only having prepared spells that were actually famous magic, or not even famous, just existing magic spells. The problem is you need very simple effects because you don't have a lot of room on the little mini card and a lot of times in magic

we just hadn't done the simplest version of the effect believe it or not. 30,000 cards in hadn't done the simplest version. So we decided that when we needed to make new things we did and we named them and maybe one day we'll make those spells. But we made it named those spells but there also are some returning spells. In fact there's a

I'm sure whether it's a rare, mythic, rare cycle. But there's a cycle of prepared spells with spells from Alpha, the Emeritus, the Emeritus, Emeritus, that's hard to say. So anyway, we did that. We had the prepared spells. So the one other thing that we did, we had a couple of things that did make it all the way through. We made a new type of token that was kind of a colorless,

I think it was like a colorless treasure token called a drone. And we had a mechanic called extra credit. So extra credit were spells that had a rider if it wasn't the first cast you spelled. First cast, yeah, you cast. Sorry, first spell you cast it or played. So the idea is if you played a spell second or third or fourth, it would have a larger spell. You wanted to play something first and then play it, it was the idea. And they were a little on the cheaper side so you could play them second.

And we decided we ended up making all the extra. or credit lessons. That's where we put the lessons originally. Okay, so now the set gets handed over to set design. So, one of the things, one of the very first things they did, they liked prepared, they did a lot of work and just figuring out how best

to play prepared, what prepares bells to make. They kind of figured out prepared function a lot like flashback in that you have things on the board that people can see and say, have to be careful how that impacts combat and stuff, much like a flashback spell in the graveyard. Oh, anyway, speaking of flashback, so one of the things they were looking at was trying to figure out how to help up the ASFAN, prepared spells help with that.

But the one other thing they were interested in was flashback. So interestingly, we had actually had flashback in original strict saving. It's something that we'd wanted to do. But the very next in Multiverse set was Innesride Midnight Hunt, which was also planning to use flashback. Flashback had been an original Indistrade, hadn't been in Shepard. Shadows over and Shrod. They wanted to bring it back. And I was fine. I'm like, okay, we could both use it. Flashback's very, you know, flexible. There's a lot of design space in it.

I said, we're going to use it differently in Shricksavent that you guys would use it. But enough of R.D. really didn't like the idea that we ended up cutting it from strict saving. But when they were looking at this, they realized how clean and clear flashback works. It's just a nice, it's one of the other ways to get your ass fan up, which is what if your instance and sorceries just doubled up? Oh, this instant sorcery, this one card is really two copies of the spell, because I can cast it and then I can flash it back. And the flavor with Lorholt, the school all about history, which is really good. Right.

Lorhold studies the past. Flashback represents spells of the past. So it was pretty cool. But the more they played around with it, the more they realized what they really wanted, like they originally put in the set in all five colors because that's how the set was structured, is they just wanted Lorhold to do it. and that's where it shined. Lorhold was the one that cared about things leaving the graveyard,

so it was very synergistic. Oh, by the way, when we made original Strix-Savon, one of our goals was to make it not feel like Ravnika. So we were very active about not doing what the Ravina Gild did with those color combinations. So Boros is very much about agro. In fact, the red-white more than any other color combination is almost always about agro.

But we were trying to not be Boros. So because this is the history school, we cared about the graveyard. Now, it turns out caring about the graveyard is complicated in red and white because white is like third in graveyard and red is maybe fifth in graveyard. So like red does not have a lot of graveyard. And white is some, but not tons. And so it was a weird place for red, white to be. We ended up with the theme of caring about things, leaving your graveyard.

There was a few ways to do that in red and white. But flashback was a slam dunk perfect answer. And so the set was, the vision was led by Annie Sardellis, and then Ian Duke and Reggie Vogue were the, Ian did the first half sets that I'm handed off to Reggie. So Reggie decided that they really wanted to do flashback, and it really just made sense as a lore whole thing. And they looked at the structure where what we had done, where no school had, like, we didn't do factory mechanics, but he's like, look, the reason you didn't do that originally was

ready to differentiate from Ravnikah. The school is differentiated. He used it with Rabnika. And you know what? Fashion mechanics are quite, we've had a lot of success with fashion mechanics. So he said,

what if I gave each school its own mechanic? Obviously, flashback goes to lower hold. So what he did is he looked at magecraft and realized that one of the ways

we had made magecraft sort of work in different schools was to lean in flavor. For example, in Silverquil, we really wanted you targeting your own things. So some of them cared about

when you cast instant sorceries that targeted you. your own things. I think just targeted a creature. It didn't have to be your own, but just targeted a creature. And then we had some spells in Prismari that was magecraft, but it got an extra bonus if you cast a spell with a manna value

of five or more, because Prismari like casting big spells. And, like, Reggie and his team realized, oh, well, each of those could be turned into their own mechanic. So, using an instant source to target your own creatures, became repartee. Using them and then getting a bonus for having a large spell, it became opus.

So they took Magerft out. or they sort of de-keyworded it, I would say, and took off the copy part. And so there's still some spells that care about your casting things, but specifically in certain schools, like in Silverquil or in Prismari, they leaned into those mechanics.

So that's what we got Repartee and Opus. Wither Bloom had always been a focus on life. We were trying to make black green different from Golgari, so we didn't want to be about the graveyard. That's why the graveyard ended up in red-white, because we didn't want black. Black-green traditionally is often. about the graveyard. Golgaris about the graveyard.

But we liked the idea that green and black both had the ability to gain life. Black also could spend life. So we really did this thing in Will the Bloom all about life. It was the biology school. It made a lot of sense. So we liked that general tie into life. And we wanted the schools, we wanted the decks cards we were making in Secret Strip Haven

to play nicely with the Strip Haven cards. So the idea of caring about life was pretty cool. So in the end, for Wither Bloom, they ended up doing with thing called infusion, but just those things that say, if you've gained life, bonus, if you've gained life this turn. And so that ended up becoming

the Witherbloom. And then for final one, Quadrox was the one that took a little more time. Quadrux ended up being something that got inspired by a mechanic called Evolve, actually created by Ethan Fleischer in the Second Great Designer Search. So in the second grade designer search,

that one was a little bit differently. We asked each of the designers to design their own world, and then all the challenges they did were in that world. So Ethan had sort of a prehistoric world that was going to evolve over time during the course of the block. Something we had tried and ended up not doing, but Ethan independently came up with a similar idea. So anyway, in prehistoric world,

he wanted to do evolution, and so he did mechanical evolve. The way evolved work is they were creatures that got a plus one, plus one counter, whenever you cast another creature, whenever another creature you controlled, entered with a power greater or a toughness greater than your creature with evolve.

So basically, increment was the same idea, but instead of getting bigger based on creatures, it gets bigger based on spells. So if you ever cast a spell whose mana value is greater than either the creature's power or toughness, it gets a plus one plus one counter. So it's essentially evolved but for spells, is the idea. So once they had all those,

they said, okay, each school is going to have its own thing, and so Silver Coal had repartee, Prismari had Opus, with the Bloomhead infusion, Lorholt had flashback, and Chondrox had increment. They then ended up adding a few... Oh, let me do the tokens real quick. So what we did envision is we changed over all the tokens, but the fractals, because the fractals already had a lot of...

You set how big they were based when you played them, so we felt that already had enough flexibility in that we didn't need to change it. So fractals are zero-zero, and you dictated how we pull some plus and counters on them. So we didn't change it. Set design didn't change it. Those stayed the same. For Inklings, Inklings originally were 2-1 flyers in Strick-Saven. We tried changing them to 2-2-9-flyers in Vision, and then in the end, set design changed them to 1-1 flyers.

They went back to being flyers, but they're smaller than they were before. And it's nice because a lot of silver quart because it's the most, it's most about casting the smallest, cheapest bells. So unless you have small riders. A 1-1 flat, obviously a much small rider than a 2-2. Then for Prismari, Prismari last time had four-four elementals. This time they have three-three elementals, but they fly. Wither Bloom had pests. So they were 1-1 creatures that when they died gain you one life.

The pests in this set, when you attack with them, they gain one life. So they change up a little bit how you use them. A little bit about sacrificing them and adding a little bit more aggression to Weatherblum. And then finally, in a little bit more. lore hold. Lourhold last time were spirit tokens. I think they were, I remember. Three-two, I think.

This time they're two-two spirits. I will say in vision design, what we handed over were two, three artifact creatures that when you cast them, when they entered, they exiled a car from a graveyard. Could be your opponents, could be yours. They simplified that and said to that. End up being two-toes.

Okay. there's two more mechanics. I'm almost still working here. There's two more mechanics to talk about. One is, they wanted to do a cycle of myth sorceries. It's an sorcery set. We do cycles, like, we don't do a lot of cycles at Mythic. They're hard to do. We've done more than anything else, we've done creature cycles, but we want to do a sorcery cycle. So,

they were looking around, and they looked back at a set called Saviors of Kamagawa. Brian Tinsman, who led that set, had wanted to make sense. flashy spells. So he made a series of, I think they were rare, rare mythic, called Epic. And the way that Epic worked was when you cast an epic spell, then at the beginning of every turn, that Epic Spell got cast. So you cast it once, and then it got cast every turn. That is quite exciting. Now, Brian was worried that that was too good, so he put a downside on it. And the downside were you never get to cast spells again. Yeah, yeah, your Epic spell would go off every turn. But in order

to get a free spell return, you weren't able to cast spells anymore. And that mechanic didn't go very well, because even though the front side is pretty exciting, the back side is just a little bit too oppressive. So when they were looking through it, they saw this, they said, oh, those were kind of a cool idea. Well, what if we just took away the negative? What if just you cast a spell and then they cast every turn? And that's just it.

No negative. And so we made what we called the paradigms. So the paradigms are loosely based on the epic spells just without the down. side. This, by the way, is where they decided to put lessons. They decided they wanted a little bit of lessons in the set. Avatarless Airbender has a bunch of cards that care about lessons.

So they thought it'd be nice to have a little bit of lessons in the set. When extra credit got killed, they were looking for a new place to do it. So it ended up being on the paradigms. The paradigms are the only lessons in the set are the paradigms. The one other thing they had to solve is the bad guys of this are called

the archaics. And there are these big, colorless alien, inscrutable creatures. And every time they would be described, the creative team would describe them, people would go, oh, so they're a drossi? Like more oldrosi? Like, well, they're not the oldrazi.

So one of the things that they were trying real hard in designing them was, is there a way to make them colorless but not feel like just, oh, they're big old drazzi? So the answer they had here is they went back to a mechanic that had shown up, interestingly, on in Rizal-A-Darza, I think?

I think it was Rizzolyarazi, yeah. That represented, oh, no, not Rizzozzi. Sorry, battle for Battle for Zendikar, I think is what it shows up. Because it's when the, when the Aldrazi are fighting the Zendikari, the people from Zendikar, the Zendikari uses magic as a weapon against,

because the Adrazi are all about coalesness. It was converge. So what Converge is, it's this mechanic that says, I get a bonus, I scale, I get a scalable bonus based on how many colors you use to cast this spell. And it goes really nicely on giant colors creatures because you just try, you're like, you can cast whatever you want, use whatever colors you have access to. And it gave the archaics a really strong identity that allowed us to make big colorous creatures in a way that did not feel like the Aldrazi. And so Converge gets used there. So those are all the mechanics that show up on, there's some cameo. mechanics. For example,

the dragons, the, the, each of the schools is named after a dragon sort of runs the school. And so there's a cycle of the dragons that each give your spells, your instant sorceries, a different keyword from the past. So there's, that's like a cameo cycle. So there are a few other cameo mechanics

and such. But anyway, that was the main thrust of that. So, six or six haven't when the dust settled, we're back, we're back at our schools. We are instant of sorceries. We have a mystical archive. So there's a lot of familiarity. But there's some brand new

stuff. We got prepared spells, which is a brand new thing we've never done before. Each school has a... Each faction... School or faction... Has a new mechanic, that's a new mechanic other than Lerhold bring back, flashback, obviously. And then we have paradigm for the mystic spells, and we have

converged for the archaic. So that, my friends, is Secrets of Shook Savings. So there's a lot of fun stuff there. I really like how it turned out. And The thing that's interesting on returns is you want to set that plays and feels like the original, but offers new things to the mix. And I think Secret Strict Savin did a very good job of that. That if you, whatever school you really like, it is back, it is doing its thing.

But this time, just with a few new tools, something slightly little differently. I mean, we are designed that if you want to play your new school cards with your old school cards from Strict Savin, they do blend nicely together. But anyway, guys, that is... I've shared with you the secrets of Secret District 7. Anyway, I hope that was interesting to you, but I'm now at work. So we all know what that means. That means instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you all next time.

Bye-bye.