Strixhaven! Cards! Words!

Hello friends! I wrote this before the pre-release week of Strixhaven however I never published it. Here's this wall of text that might be read as the rambling of a mad man but that's just my favorite literature genre. 

Environmental Sciences art by Jokubas Uogintas

When I started this blog(?) website (?) whatever this ends up being I was in a mindset that I didn't want to make set reviews. Because I am bad at it and might end up shooting my foot? Yes! However for this post(?) entry(?) review(?) I will be talking about the cards that I like for EDH in Strixheaven for two reasons, well actually one, it's not a massive undertaking and it will be better for the average attention span of the internet user. 

These cards will be in set number order. Also, I will not be using the Commander 2021 precon decks since they are still spoiling them as I write this. The set numbers start in colorless but only the Lesson cards, then WUBRG order, moving into multicolor, and finally colorless artifacts (I guess artifacts don't count as colorless anymore). So, what I'm saying here is that there will be an overlap between set number and color. So, let your mind flow and follow the lettered road. 

If this were a clickbait blog, which I'm not saying I will never do clickbait but if it were this would be My Top 10 Strixhaven Cards! Section where I would talk about my “honorable mentions” and those cards would be the Lesson cards. 

[A quick tangent]

The Commander format, I believe, should grow organically from standard sets and not be forced by ancillary products or commander specific products. In Commander we don't have neither wishboards nor sideboards but thanks to the power of Rule 0 we can try to convince our playgroup to allow us to use these cards outside the 99 making our deck technically have a greater number of cards than what is “legal” in the format.

[Tangent end]

Lesson is a Sorcery subtype that can be brought into your hand from the sideboard and/or wishboard by cards with the ability Learn. The introduction of this  mechanic, Learn, and this card subtype, Lesson, would’ve been a great opportunity to diversify the format adding a wishboard to it. Yes, this would mean a pre-emptive ban or possibly more bans down the road, and we know that the Rules Committee likes to keep the bans at a minimum. Having said all of this I think that Learn is a great mechanic that will give card advantage or at least selection to colors that are weak in this area, and as important as that is to remember that cards with the subtype Lesson can still be added to your deck as part of the 99.

I’d like to talk about Environmental Sciences. I never thought that would become a name in Magic: The Gathering but here we are. This colorless card gives access to all colors to unconditional basic land fetching and incidental lifegain but that's just gravy. I think this card will occupy a spot in decks whose colors are bad at ramping, especially in white since it's the color that suffers the most at ramping and card drawing, even with the recent fixes Wizards of The Coast have made but I will stop the topic of White before I shoot myself on the foot. I don't know if this card will ever see play in green because in the green 2 drop spot we already have cards like Three Visits and Nature’s Lore which make you search in your deck for any kind of Forest card and can put it into the battlefield directly, untapped unless the card specifies it. 

I’ve been here like an hour, after writing that last paragraph, staring listlessly at the white card section of the spoiler gallery in Scryfall. It's hubris at this point that makes me want to talk about the color white in EDH or in Magic: The Gathering in general. However, I will shake it off and talk about Semester’s End. I don’t know why I didn't remember this card from preview season, maybe it is the name, maybe the celebratory art that has been overused in the last few years in sets. Whatever the reason might have been, let's say it as it is, in the perfect shell this card can do a lot of crazy stuff. In an Atraxa deck this card is bonkers good, and to be really really honest that's in any permutation of Atraxa. This card will help you reset all of your Planeswalkers, and if for some reason you don't have something that puts those +1/+1 counters on creatures this will put those counters in it. A very important thing to notice, because I’ve been told by many people, however you want to see it, this is not Teferi’s Protection (TP). This card can, in fact, protect your creatures from a board wipe making it a defensive card as TP, but this card, unlike TP, creates a value engine triggering all of your Enter The Battlefield (ETB) abilities when the creatures ETB. Now we need a good 5 color ETB  commander for playing this besides Yarok, Yorion, and Panharmonicon in the same deck, a boy can dream. 

My, whoever is reading this at this point and hasn't left the blog ashamed of what they’re reading, have you seen Jadzi, Oracle of Arcavios // Journey to The Oracle? These two sides of this MDFC are both my favorite Blue and Green cards. I guess I'm getting a bit out of the WUBRG order and the collector number order, but in the end it doesn’t even matter. This card is great for any UGx deck that has a land theme or sub-theme. Jadzi is good with cards like Oracle of Mul Daya and Courser of Kruphix because they let me see they reveal the top of the deck and gives me additional information on how to use my mana during the turn. If you decide to use Jadzi’s ability you will end up having more mana available during your turn for doing more shenanigans. 

One important caveat is that with Oracle of Mul Daya and/or Courser of Kruphix the information on top of your deck is publicly available and your opponents will know what cards you are drawing, but these cards also fix you the top of your library for Jadzi since both allow playing lands from the top of it. At this point is important to notice that Jadzi also opens up an archetype that allows you to cast spells from the top of your deck and with Jadzi’s magecraft you can keep casting from the top of your deck if you have a land sub-theme that allows you to play more lands by turn so you can free the top with Oracle of Mul Daya or Courser of Kruphix, also adding shuffling effects from Fetch Lands can fix you the top of the library. 

One of the best things about this card is that it has its own form of protection. Discard a card to return Jadzi to its owner's hand. *mindblown* We can fuel our graveyard with lands, so we can make synergies with our land sub-theme. With cards like Ramunap Excavator and Crucible of Worlds we can bring back those lands for and they are not going to waste when we discard them. We can also discard spells with Flashback and Jump-Start for later use.

Now, side numero dos of this MDFC, Journey to the Oracle, is a doozy. This side is extra usable in any UG/UGx land strategies. With cards like Tatyova, Benthic Druid and Aesi, Tyrant of The Gyre Strait (I have this precon deck laying around my room and I just learned Aesi’s name is that long) you will always be drawing cards and having lots of lands on your hand. With Journey to The Oracle, imagine this, you drop 4 lands at the same time. You have Tatyova and Aesi in the battlefield, they both trigger and you draw 8 cards, and you end up returning Journey to your hand because most likely you will have 8 lands in play, if you have 4 untapped lands available rinse and repeat as long as you can. We are talking green, we are talking lands, a landfall deck will be very VERY happy with this card with all the triggers, specially those Avenger of Zendikar plant tokens. 

There was a period of time when the competitive tier of EDH efficient deck building was dominated by a card named Flash. The mere existence of this card created a disparity in power levels in the high power and/or competitive communities of EDH. This piece of cardboard allowed for lines of plays that won at instant speed with Protean Hulk into  Thassa’s Oracle and Tainted Pact lines and most of the time on the stack of a counter war, and sometimes on top of a stack of Flashes trying to resolve. 

I want to talk a little bit about Rushed Rebirth and how it *M I G H T* have the potential to replace Flash in a more convoluted way. This sounds competitive, right?  However, for me, this, in general, is not a competitive review. I'm a casual player that enjoys high powered games and this card ticked something in me, the need for convoluted combos. I'm a simple person, with simple needs. My favorite commander is Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain which is a combo engine in the command zone.