Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1333: Secrets of Strixhaven Creative with Lauren Bond

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

In this episode, I sit down with Creative Lead Lauren Bond to talk about the worldbuilding of Secrets of Strixhaven.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to other drive to work at Home Edition. So I tend to use these to do interviews. Today is no different. Today we're talking secrets of trick-saving, creative, with the creative lead for the set, Lauren Bond. Hey, Lauren.

Hello, thank you so much for having me. Okay, so this is a return. So sometimes we go to brand new places. Sometimes we go back to places. We reinvent them, but this really isn't a reinvention. This is mostly trying to come. capture what it was before, adding on a little bit. So do you want to talk about what it's like to sort of approach a return? Yeah, so this was my second return to set. I worked on

Tarkia Dragon Storm previously. So a lot of it is really about starting with a deep research dive, what happened in the original set and what has happened since then across the many different card sets that we have produced in the meantime, things like what happened during March of the Machine or even little tidbits that we might have included in sets like foundations, or a jumpstart pack to really kind of understand the full state of the plane at the time that we're going to it. Okay, so let's start. What has happened to Strick-Safing since last time we've been on Strick-Savon? There's that minor thing like the Forexian invasion.

You know, it caused some problems across the multiverse on Strick-Savon in particular. Most of the casualties were the professors. They stood up against the Forexians to protect their students. There were, of course, still student casualties. as well. So we really wanted to ensure that we reflected that there had been dramatic shifts, that there had been deaths, that people had, that it had an impact on the students' lives and experiences. Also, parts of the campus were destroyed. So we had to rebuild a new design for the the biblioplex from, I was nearly going to call it the Ovidioplex because Ovidio was the lead art

director. He led the redesign of the biblioplex, as well as kind of other areas and elements of the campus. That was the main thing that has occurred because it hasn't actually been that long in in game or in in universe timeline terms. Okay. So let's walk through school. We're going to talk to the five schools and we'll talk about sort of where they were and where they are now. So we're going to I'm going to go in a Woburgish order starting with Strick-Saven. Not strict saving. We're on Strick-Saving. Starting with Silverquil. I do that all the time. Black school. School of Language. So Silverquil is, I'm a little biased, the best school. And one of the things that was really interesting was really to think more additive. Like they're still the school college of language. They're still focused on things like linguistics and communication. But also what would be the impact of having students from across the multiverse. So I was thinking of like planar linguistics. They're going to be studying languages from outside the plane as well. And they have access to what that looks like. They're also going to be thinking about things like. subterfuge and investigation and even diplomacy more so. So we kind of expanded or maybe more just

specified what their kind of roster of subjects were going to look like. And then the big thing is for each of the schools, we wanted to think about what did the students do beyond just the campus. The first Strickson really gave us a deep dive into school life. And for this, we wanted to kind of, you know, as we're also leveling up in time, aging, I think they call that. So are the students at the schools? And so we wanted to see what does it look like as you're approaching graduation, that like anxiety and excitement that comes with the sense of I'm going to have to go into the real world and maybe use my degree. And so for each of the schools, we have an off-site research location or practicum location for Silverquil. That's the forum of Amity, really digging into, okay, how does a plane that had a blood age manage to keep the peace in the present time? So we're going to see diplomats from across the place. plane and people negotiating and conversing and the students really putting those linguistic skills to the test. Okay. Also, I do know there was a change in the mascot. You want to talk a little bit about how to change the mascot? Yeah, this was the most dramatic change. Some of the other ones

had like minor tweaks. But for the silver quill, we really looked at the original mascot and there was a lot of there's a lot of parallels with ferexian oil. And we thought it was an interesting idea to think, well, obviously these are mascots they create, they design them themselves. And the zeitgeist, the sort of aesthetic choices, would probably want to shift as a result of having a bunch of feroxian oil destroying and converting and completing all of your professors. So we kind of tweaked the design to both give us a little bit more emphasis on that white manna side, but also to feel more calligraphy and a little less ink focused. Okay. Next we go to Prismari, our blue-red art school. Prismari is similarly we kind of expand some of the different things that they'd be interested in, especially here we see like itter instances where they're bringing in like what about a new Capena jazz professor and kind of these other potential influences from outside the plane. And their big research location is called the Spectacle Summit. I like to think of it as a music festival combined with a like a Renfair market,

it combined with like this is your capstone performances are all going to be here. Like if you've ever been to a fringe festival, it has very much that energy. Equal parts, exciting and terrifying because you're kind of putting yourself out there in the world in front of an audience of people that are not just your peers anymore. But also it takes place in this beautiful natural environment that itself is also a muse for the students. So, and comes with its own dangers. Art students are not like the best known for their.

ability to hang out in nature and their survival skills. So this might be a little bit of an extra challenge for Prismari students. Anything else that changed about Prismari? That was the main focus was really just building out. We have some costume adjustments in general across the board, Prismari leaning into kind of looser, baggyer clothing. A lot of that is really just inspired by the idea of like that happens in schools with uniforms all the time. The idea of like, you know, fashions change. time moves forward. So we really kind of wanted to give a sense of like, Strixhaven is not a static place. It's going to adapt and evolve. And as new professors come in, people with more and different opinions, they do have a new dean. We, Nisari is still one of the deans. They are the dean,

the red aligned dean expression. But the dean of perfection is actually there, and who was previously a white or a blue and red individual who's kind of really focused on the duality. So we get to hear a little bit about how she's kind of stepping up to the position, but struggling a little bit with not, with only focusing on one side of the Prismari Manor colors. Okay. Next up, we have Witherbloom, black green, the school of science. The Witherbloom again still really focused on that cycle of life and death and their off-campus location that they're visiting is very focused on that. It's literally a village nature reserve inside the body of the skeleton of a long dead Titan called Titan's grave. And some of the cool and interesting additions to them, we have a new

Plainswalker who is a Witherblum professor. This is Professor Delian Fell. And he has a little bit of a mysterious background. He died and he's back. So, you know, it's very weatherbloom-coded, but still comes with its own mysteries. Lots of rumors abound about him around the school for the students. And also they have a new dean as well. This is Moseo. This is the new dean of Vane. Aowlin professor that in order to survive fereosis and not become completed, he just excised all of his flesh. And so now he's a skeleton, which I think is pretty cool. And the other thing we tweaked with them is the pests. Witherblum is all about experimenting with life. So it seemed appropriate that they would also use their pests as experiments and not just as ingredients. So kind of chimerizing, combining them

with more elements of other animal creatures. So we have pest apes and pests frogs and other kind of more interesting amalgams while still retaining that squishy cuteness that they have. Okay. Next up we get to Lorhold, Red White, our History College. Lordhold, as the History College in many ways probably changed the least, they still have the same dean. It's Augusta. She just reanimated herself as a spirit statue

after she died in the Phrexian invasion, which totally makes sense. The Dean of Order would want to maintain the continuity of leadership. Their off-site research location might actually be one of my favorites. It's the Fields of Strife. This is really an opportunity

that we had to dig into that history of the plane. The Lorhold students are studying the like 700 years in which the people of the plane were at war with each other. And this location is where we see these restless spirits repeating and reiterating these battles over and over and over again. And that part, it's like really getting to play with that idea of, yeah, if you're studying history and you have magic, like you can have literal primary research. You can go talk to someone from the past. but that there is an element of danger with that. You know, how much the spirits retain of themselves? How much do they still, do they even know that their battle is over?

And so sometimes that might mean they think that you're actually just a combatant that they need to face. And yeah, that's the main kind of main updates for Lerhold. Okay. And we get to our fifth college, green blue, quondrix, the math college. Yeah. So, Quondrix, not a ton changed here. terms of kind of the fractal design is very much still the same. It's so cool looking. We didn't really want to mess around with that. And we also really loved kind of leaning into just the way in

which their magic looks. So we're really referencing those like mathematical visuals over and again in this iteration of the setting. We do expand out. So their research locations actually based on a place like randomly named on the map in the original Strix, Haven. And I was like, that's a cool name. What do we think is there? It's called the Paradox Gardens, and it's a location that's like equal parts, like experiment site and sort of weird magical phenomenon. So the students themselves are basically part of that experiment as they kind of break and fundamentally alter as many rules of reality as they possibly can. We also have some, we also see like our returning characters as well. So like Zimon is coming back. So we get to kind of explore a little bit of where those characters

from the previous set are and kind of talk a little bit to like, yeah, Zimon went through a lot on Duskmore and some of these other places that these characters have been to. You know, Quintorius sparked as a plains walker. So that really lets us kind of see and get that sense of like time progressing. And also for some students having a hard time graduating, like Rutha, she's kind of stuck in a cycle of not being able to graduate because of that obsession with perfection that goes hand in hand with being a artistic creative. So something you mentioned, I want to talk a little bit more about is one of the big side effects.

Obviously, the war happened. But the Oman Pass, actually, you sort of talked about this. Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about how the school changed with the Omen Pass existing. Yeah. So we kind of baseline, we just see students from other planes and we see elements from other planes. So you'll definitely catch like a handful. Like, for example, Commander has a cycle of visiting professors.

They're each from a different place in the multiverse. They come with kind of evocative spells that they've prepared. We also have characters like Lewin, who's in our main fiction, who's literally the elf from Lorwyn. And so they're coming in and they're bringing these different perspectives with them. Omens of Chaos, the novel that released very recently, is also really focused on that. So we're able to kind of pull on some of those threads and there is some tensions. Not everyone is happy about these omen paths. It's a potential source of danger.

Obviously, the last time extra planer people came in, it wasn't so good for Strix Haven. So there's definitely attention in how much do we control it, how much do we regulate or monitor it, how much do we try and just stop it altogether and not want these outside influences. We also got to riff on some fun ideas like, of course, there's probably like a Tilarian professor here, you know, visiting. Or maybe there's a nice rivalry between these two wizardly institutions as they kind of attempt to outdo each other. And then also really folding it in into kind of the academics that the students would be pursuing. There's one particular piece of art which showcases a silverquil student. And instead of using the typical calligraphy, they're using like rooms from Caldheim and the language from Kamigawa as like, yeah, of course, you would be studying the writings of other places and other people because that's the most exciting thing as an academic. Suddenly this literal multiverse of academia has opened up to you.

Okay, so let's talk about there's some villains. So the archaics, let's talk a little bit about who the archaics are and how we showed them off in the set. So the archaics are interesting because they were not villains. And in some ways, they're not really villains so much as they are antagonists in this setting. There are some mysteries that I cannot fully answer for you today, but perhaps a certain reality fracture may provide you some more insights. but the archaics themselves have a very mysterious origin to most people on the plane. Obviously, thankfully for us, we have the power of exposition. So the archaics are, each of them is essentially a former oracle.

At some point, in the history of the plane, there is an oracle. They die. And then their soul is sort of cascaded backwards through time to the dawning of the plane. And those are the archaic. So they have this kind of future knowledge and past knowledge. some of them are literally archaics or oracles that have not existed yet on the plane. And in particular, the dawning archaic, the idea is that this is both the last oracle of the plane and the first archaic of the plane. And so whatever is happening outside of the confines of

Archavios is having very intense effects on these beings. You have to imagine if you are a living paradox in a lot of ways, any changes to the continuity of, of the world is going to have a negative effect on you. And so we see these archaics being essentially, their very nature being shifted and disruptive, and it's painful and uncomfortable and sort of randomizing for them in a way that causes them to lash out in these magical ways that's not necessarily within their control. But obviously, they're also giant

beings, so you can't really like easily contain that. So it's a pretty big problem that is impacting students across the plane. And we see a bunch of different archaics across the set kind of showcasing how that danger is being caused by something that they would never have expected being the source of that danger. Yeah, I know one of the challenges was giant creatures sort of alien form, definitely sort of brush up against Aldrazi. How did you guys separate them from the Ardrazi? Very much, though. So a lot of it was kind of continuing on from the early iteration. The first set, I think only had one archaic card and like one archaic spell. So we still knew.

that they were rooted in colorless, but when the design team was working on the set, they were putting the converge mechanic in the set, which was kind of, it calls on all colors of mana. And I thought that was a really nice tie-in for the archaics, because they're part of the plane is these snarls, these tangles of mana. And so it strikes me as like, if you are a being that's fundamental to the plane, it's not that they are the antithesis of mana like the Aldrazi are, is that they are the sort of amalgamation of all of these things and that, you know, when they're an oracle,

they're kind of the epitome of maybe one color. So when they become an archaic, they kind of are constantly a part of the plane and sort of exploring that. And so I really love having the converge mechanic as kind of the tie-through, both on spell cards and on the archaic creature cards. And then we also explored a few designs for colored archaics, which can also be cast for colorless mana. So they kind of split that difference. to really emphasize that they're being impacted by what's happening to the plane. They're kind of changing and shifting in ways that they might not normally to make them feel more strange, more bizarre from what they were previously. Yeah.

So the other thing we talked to, you mentioned this, but I want to go a little broader is. So Arcadios is the plane that this is on. Original strict saving really, really barely left the campus. So you talked a little bit about the field trips. How else were you sort of showing off for KVos this time? Yeah, so some of it is purely just in like the beauty of basic lands. We definitely wanted to showcase as many broad locations. We have like cycles of star arches.

And we did a little bit of development. Ovidio was very passionate about creating the Owlin village. So we could kind of see a place that was like literally not connected to the school as the home of Abigail, one of our characters. and kind of get a little bit of the, we can use it for like those moments of like seeing your kid off to school as they like wait for the, wait for the bus. So we kind of have some very specific places and some more general environments.

And really building out that sense of what else could there be. Some of it is also in taking like creature types that we had previously that we didn't really have a ton of. The first set had like one burrog, one frog wizard. And we decided that perhaps we should have more. more of those this time and kind of bringing in additional creature types that we hadn't seen previously to really emphasize this sense of Archavius is a big continent or Archavius is a big

plain. Strict savin is not a singular continent on this plane. And there's a whole other continent we've never even been to, which I want to go to. So maybe ask for that. This is my plea. And that really let us kind of see these other pieces. But it was a difficult balance because it's still a factionalized debt. It still wants to be about the school. It still wants to have those school elements because that's what people love about Strick's Haven. And that's really why we leaned into the research locations because it kind of give us a little bit of the best of both. We could keep it school focused while showing you these things that you hadn't seen previously. So you brought Abigail. So I want to touch about something that's pretty cool that I don't

know if the average person even knows, which is just talk a little bit about Abigail. We did something special with Abigail that I'd like to sort of inform the audience. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So Abigail was very early on, actually, even before we would normally create characters for a set, because we knew these characters were going to show up in Lorwyn. We had kind of a team discussion about the characters. And I did some pitching of who I thought would be like a good fit for the kind of core group. We knew we were going to have another core group like we had previously. So we worked closely with Roy. And as part of that, I wanted a little bit of contrast with the previous characters. I want to explore things that we hadn't. And to me, if Silver Cool is the School of Language, that includes all languages. And I think it's really easy for people default to spoken language and written language and forget about sign language. And so I thought this was a really cool opportunity

for us to kind of showcase that Silverquil is really about all of those pieces and have a deaf character in Silverquil. So we created the character of Abigail. We worked with an external consultant kind of refined some of the details. One of the things that's particularly hard about a card set is that we don't have audio

and we don't have motion. So it's hard to showcase someone using sign language or even kind of explicitly be able to describe someone as being deaf. But because she was a character in the fiction, that really gave us the opportunity to dig a lot deeper into kind of the specifics of that character. So the consultant gave us a lot of guidance around that, helped us kind of develop the hearing aids that she wears. And then one of the things that I love about working at Wizards is like that could have been where we ended it, but it became this huge yes and for more. all these other teams. So the arena team added Abigail in as a, as a, um, one of the mascots that you can get. That's not the correct word. Avatar. Thank you. And have her doing sign language, worked with the same consultant again. She's in the trailer video doing the same thing. And because she only has three fingers,

we needed, they needed to kind of have a modified version of sign language that was appropriate for her hands. And that to me is just like the beauty of everyone saying like, yeah, we're going to to do this. We could have just left it, but it's important to us to make sure that we kind of showcase this character from beginning to end. She's an integral part of the story. So I love how much people have enjoyed this character. She's also kind of, she's a silver quill. So she's also like kind of snooty and very opinionated and has a tendency to think other people are wrong and that she is correct. And so, but all of that is like part of her personality. And yeah, so it was really fun to be able to be part of developing that character.

and then be able to see everyone kind of run with that character and bring her to life. Okay, the next one we have to be tricky with because there's some stuff we can't say. Oh, okay. One of the roles of this set, we are building up to a big finale. Absolutely. While we were visiting Strickson, there's some story, some pretty important story that got interwoven into this. So without giving away things we can't give away, do you want to talk a little bit about what you can about incorporating the larger story into the set? Yeah.

So, spoilers for folks who haven't read the fiction yet, but one of the big things that is revealed at the end of the fiction is that Tam is certainly not all that she seems. And that I think was maybe apparent to some people, but she essentially ends up betraying the friend group at the end of the fiction and casts Jodzi, the current oracle of the plane, through a portal to some unknown location that may or may not have anything to do with those portal lands that you've also seen. I don't know. That's a hype. They're portals. Why would they be related? But that was kind of this big buildup for this character that we'd seen in the Florwin story. She'd gotten deeply entrenched with this group of people. But she also has a mission that we don't necessarily know a lot about. She has something that she's supposed to be doing. We also see hints with the side story with the Professor Rall. As we all know, he's clearly an Orsav professor.

And that, so it makes perfect sense that he would be teaching at Silverquil. And the strange mysteries that abound with what is going on there and some of the hints that we saw at the end of the previous, the Lorwin story as well. But one of the big things that maybe you can kind of hypothesize off of is that whatever is happening impacted the archaics. And these are beings that are from both the past and the future of the plane often simultaneously. So maybe take that as a little bit of a hint for strange things that might be going on. and whatever is through that portal where Jodzi has now ended up. And if you've not read the stories, I heartily encourage you to read the stories because, let's just say,

it might matter. It might matter for what's going on. So we are building to, this is, for those that don't know, reality fracture is kind of like March of the Machine or War of the Spark. It's our big finale. And so, and we've been a little bit subtler this time with our story than we have some past time.

And so maybe the end of the war of spark, you saw it coming that Nicole Bowles was trying to take over everything. This time, what's going on? There's a lot of hints. If you read the stories, there's a lot of hints of what's going on. I live for every article or every post

that someone is making, hypothesizing, what they think is going on. It brings me life. So more of those. So, okay, so the delve back into Strict Savin itself. Was there anything else? So the big new sort of mechanical thing in the set was prepared spells. So what was the challenge creatively of doing prepared spells?

Yeah. Prepared was honestly was a lot of fun just sort of conceptually. But it was definitely like there's sort of the technical aspects of both tracking, like which cards are reprints, which cards are new cards, and the constraints of very small line of text to be able to put spell names. And then one of the big things is typically we want our art to reflect what is happening on the card. And for the most part, most of the spells are kind of connected to what could be happening, but really making sure we kind of combine all of that in together.

So if the spell is able to give something flying, we're going to make sure that's reflected in the art of the creature in addition to anything else that the creature might be doing. So these are kind of just the intricacies of how we look at like the mechanics. I think prepare spells tend to be a little bit bigger and flashier than like a typical creature ability might look. So that was both a challenge for the art and an opportunity to get a little bit to emphasize more of that magic, more of that cool epic side of what it means to be a mage at Silverquil. And then of course, yeah, just the challenge of finding names that worked and made sense with what was happening and kind of tying that together as a complete package in a very small amount of text. So we are almost out of time. So I'm trying to think anything we haven't hit upon, anything about strict saving that you had fun putting together or doing little details maybe that fell between the cracks of what we talked about today?

Nothing major. I think this was a set where there was a lot of just a lot of really wonderful collaborators from game design making suggestions of like stories and that we could put on cards to fun top downs. and then my co-creatives on the narrative team and creating the new characters and flushing out the world. Like this was, it's very fun to just play essentially a big old game of yes and. And that's what the set got to be. There was everything that we got to do was really just like adding to the story. And so I hope that people enjoy what they got. And I also hope a little bit that people feel like there's still more to find and more to learn about the plane because this is a really fun setting to work on.

So I do hope we get to come back. So before we wrap up, one last thing, I forgot you talked about. Let's talk about the mystical archive before we wrap up. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's just gorgeous. That's the main thing. It's such a fun conceit that these are spells that exist on the plane. This time, one of the things we did a little bit differently is that some of the card art

actually features like Silverquil inspired. See, I do the same thing. Strixhaven colleges in the art. So there's a lot of any of the. dual spells, we kind of used the school visuals often to kind of reinforce that. Because I also like the idea that even though they're studying from across the multiverse, sometimes the origin of these spells might have been the school itself. Or they've decided like, we've perfected this.

So we're going to put ourselves into the mystical archive, you know, in that kind of academic botanist sort of way. So it was a fun to kind of, again, to play yes and to expand on what was done previously, call back to characters to reincorporate visuals and just it's such a fun style to work with and commission and concept for yeah yeah and the cards ended up looking really really really pretty so it's it's so hard to get that wrong so you know it's kind of a cheat code well anyway I want to thank you so much for being with us today walking through all the cool things um I I was very involved in the making of Strick-Shaven the first time around. And it is fun to see how much the school

keeps expanding. And one of the things I get questions all the time on is like, so what school, like, if I want to study this subject, what school is in? And there's much debate and this and that. Absolutely. It's fun. Like, okay, I'll ask you the question that I got asked today before we wrap up, see where you put it. Where do you put psychology? Okay. So, all right, I say this. And let me preface this. I was a psychology major. I measured in psychology and drama, and I do consider myself, like, somewhere in between Silverquil and Prismari.

So I actually had assigned psychology into Prismari. Granted, I think it could also probably go into Silverquil and aspects of it could probably also go into Warhol. The reason why we went with kind of psychology as the nexus of it is really taking on more of the analytical side of psychology and the idea of art as wanting to impact and influence people's emotions, which is kind of, I mean, psychology is equal parts about behavior as it is about emotion. So the behavior side might end up more in Lorholt, that my emotion side might end up more in Prismari, but that idea that in order to impact and influence people's emotions effectively,

you need to be able to understand them. So that was kind of where the logic was for Prismari ending up in there. And maybe there's also just a little bit of personal mind as a psychology and theater major. I'm like, these two things are interconnected. They should clearly be in the same school. But I think that really speaks to that realistically, like, I could see a world in which, like, a major fits kind of into one school, but you have professors from another school coming to teach elements of it. Like, I put education into silverquil, because education is about effective communication, but obviously you can't educate on subjects you don't know and understand. So it's more like they teach the meta of how to talk to students, but then the content needs to come from the other disciplines that you might be part of. So it's okay if people disagree with me, I may be biased in this particular instance when it comes to psychology. Psychology is interesting.

Other than kind of quandricks, you can argue any of the schools, really? Yep. I mean, it is a science. I mean, the history is very much about psychology and understanding. If you go into like the neuroscience brain part, that feels very wither bloom. So yeah, it's one of those that maybe they break it out into more sub-departments. Anyway, so thank you so much for being. with us today, Lauren. It was fun to hear all about the making of secrets of strict saving.

It was a pleasure. Thanks so much. So guys, I'm now at my desk. So we all know what that means means this is the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.