How Strixhaven Changed the Color Pie 

Are you curious what college you would fall under and found WOTC's quiz to be far too simple then head over to www.dicetry.com to take the one I made

i love the fact that the mage featured in lorehold is a loxodon....coz you know as they say an elephant never forgets

Another idea I had for re-imagining the Black/Green college of Strixhaven was for it to be a college of medicine. From Green we get a college that seeks a harmonious existence while Black gives us a school that seeks its goals no matter where it has to look. Together we have a school that seeks to improve the body while restoring its harmonious existence no matter what/where it has to go to find the cure. Those leaning to the Green side become physicians, nutritionists and such who look to the natural world and traditional practices for cures and remedies to injuries, ailments and illnesses. Those who lean to the Black become the surgeon who takes a knife to his charges in order to heal or better their life, or the virologist who studies diseases in order to find a way to use them for the betterment of the living. These are the doctors who will not hesitate to harm if it will benefit the patient in the long run, or use experimental medicine to cure their charges.

Math is all about finding relationship and patterns in nature and finding out how to describe them. It's such a fresh and interesting way to look at Simic!!

As someone of a Jeskai alignment I really appreciate Lorehold. While Izzet expressed my red-blue and Azorious my white-blue very well, I never felt the same resonance with white-red until Lorehold.

I like how the idea of duality is exemplified by the deans of each school. Ravnica’s guilds are all led by a hybrid character that shows the mixed ideology, but the schools of strixhaven have different teachers with different methods that manage to coexist

"I felt Lorehold was one of my favorites, taking a color combination and doing it in a fresh way. Next let's look at a college I felt was the opposite." Oh boy, Witherbloom time.

Witherbloom isn't anything super new for green/black, but it's very different from Golgari, which is cool on its own Golgari cares a lot about getting value out of the graveyard, Witherbloom cares a lot about life gain and drain

Honestly magic geometry class sounds awesome. Like, finding the fundamental forces that our world is dependent on is so metaphysical. Although, studying society through its culture and history also sounds cool.

I love seeing alternative interpretations of the colors! Recontextualizing the enemy pairs around the environment of a school is brilliant, and the fact that they also showed the spectrum between the two colors present was also fantastic. I'm extremely happy with the ideas strixhaven presents and with the way this video came out. I hope in the future they do something similar with the allied pairs, and I also hope that more variations of green/black show up. As nice as golgari/witherbloom is, I'd love to see what else the color combination has to offer instead of reinforcing the same ideas in different contexts

I'm not a huge fan of Strixhaven, but I loved the video, it was entertaining and fun to hear the voice of other content creators, it really ties the community together. Very interesting and clear explanation on the colors. great job

Omg , this is so well made! The voice acting and the editing is very nice.

I certainly expressed myself through this collaboration ;) #prismari

This was a set I really appreciated. I'd made the comment so many times that even when we're not on Ravnica, we're still on Ravnica. By this I mean that the dual color cards too often just feel like extensions of what the guilds ingrained as what the two colors do. Izzet does spell slinging, golgari plays with the graveyard, gruul smash. But that's also why I was so disappointed with this set too, particularly with witherbloom and prismari. Witherbloom, as you touched on, had a different aesthetic from golgari, but mechanically was so close that it barely registered as a different world. Prismari on the surface felt different, until you saw that Wizards still put a lot of the cards meant to be artistic expression as instants and sorceries, which again made the college feel pretty izzet. Prismari, I think, could have benefited either from more artifact focus (though that might have pulled too much from the lorehold identity) or enchantress focused where you can "perform" by paying a cost into an activated ability of the enchantment, or if not that, by bringing back the level up system from Zendikar to show that the performers are becoming more a master of their craft through rehearsal and experience.

Awesome video! It felt like a seminar work, with all the quoatations and stuff and it all looks so professional. Your videos really show what the color pie really is about and I've larned a lot from them, especially the shards/wedges series. Keep it up!

I’d be curious to see what the allied color pair subjects would be. My guesses: W/U social science U/B law and/or poli-sci B/R business? R/G environmental science G/W religious studies

I love the flavor and mechanics of Simic and having Quandrix complement the Combine while also having it's own flavor is fantastic!

I love the scroll gatling gun

"true art can not exist without red" *cries in blood artist*

Boros and Lorehold are both interesting in how they accomplish the goals of one color, through the methods of the other. While White is Peace through Law and Red is Freedom through Action. Boros instead is Peace through Action. That's what makes Lorehold interesting as it could be viewed as Freedom through Law. By learning from history, the USA was able to secure our freedoms during our founding by building protections into the law of the constitution to safeguard those freedoms, which history showed would otherwise be trampled. And they also learned enough from history to know to put in a method of adding amendments to secure further rights and freedoms that they hadn't realized needed protecting.

This was amazingly good! I love learning more about the colours and what do they mean. I didn't realized what Strixhaven was about, but now I'm loving it.

I liked witherbloom's radically different mechanical implementation, yet I see your point; if I was going radically differently as you are looking for I'd go for destiny which is usually a blue field as blue wants to understand the future, as but black wants control over their own destiny could destiny manipulation or exercise of free will be a good target for a future Green Black group

I think they took everything into good account when making strixhaven, and that the dialectic approach of enemy colors really works for an academic setting. I do kind of wish that there was some sort of blue-green humanities focus though (classics, history, social science kind of thing), both describing the world as it is and dreaming of the world as it could be.

great video man, and silverquill made me think of a black red version that use words to drive others to madness, rage,depression,etc, that use word like curses feeling them with heavy emotion or pulling on ones passion to drive them forward

Loved the college breakdowns! Made it easy to see why I ended up with witherbloom, definitely leaning on the green side, but seeing that take on boros definitely makes lorehold one of my favorites.

Came out just as I went on break, perfect timing

And there we have it. A second season on this plane could very well introduce a rival school to Strixhaven. Either way i loved your dive into their philosophies.

If strixhaven had a rival school? What would the 5 allied colored houses stand for?

I feel like lorehold could easily be red blue. Wanting to search for knowledge (blue) and the need for adventure (red)

Really awesome. In a wat it felt wholesome to hear everyone help here. I have definetely found out more about my favorite colors

I think I'm somewhere between a Black focused Witherbloom or Silverquill and a Blue focused Quandrix. Secretly though, I'm just a Dimir infiltrator, here to steal all of the knowledge that Strixhaven has to offer. I might even align myself with the Oriqs too, as their whole thing seems to be the uncovering of forbidden knowledge.

WOWZERS,I wish these colleges had some individual videos but i guess there isn't enough info to make a 10 minute video about each

I really like Prismari, however, I feel like it's the easy way out. It kinda reads like an inverted Izzet. Yeah, Izzet was also Red-Blue, but I'd say the whole focus on invention and technology gave it more of a Blue presence overall. 60/40. Prismari does the same, but for red. Its focus is on art and performance, something that's much more Red than anything, and even when they focus more on Blue, it still fits mostly red. Another 60/40, but with Red instead. I'm not saying its neccesarily bad, it works, but it certantly is not a Lorehold or Silverquill.

I think Witherbloom could have been an amazing college of bioengineering. Although normally a simic deal, green seeks to be among nature, and black wants to warp it to its desires, that sounds like a perfect biohacker archetype that uses black magic and gross experiments to reach the apex of the natural world

I really like the music you played in the Prismari section!

I personally like that Golgari is basically the same everywhere, because the cycle of life and death is universal in all places with both

prismari: exist grixis: *heavy breathing*

Just wow! My favorite video so far.

The problem with green black is they focus on aspects biology which they have done before with rot, poison, places of death where what they could have done is people interested in the forgotten creatures which though is not perfect still would be something different or they could have gone the medicine path. We have in this historians, biologist, artists, writers, and mathematics.

Thank you for the illuminating discussion! Some thoughts inspired by black-green being repetitive so far. Black mana is swamp energy. A swamp is a forested wetland. A transitional, liminal zone that incorporates aspects of blue and green but denies each source to make something of its own: black mana. But if a black mage wants to reconnect to green energy, what would happen? Black mana takes from blue and green for self-aggrandization. Why would black mana ever return to holding itself responsible to ancestors, as found in the connection to forest energy? The black mage has perhaps learned that the cycle of life and death applies to them and that eventually, they will be reborn. And the horizon of black mana's self-concern stretches to include the far future of their rebirth. Perhaps, a selfish concern for the future generations in which they will be reborn becomes the focus of evocation. One day, the black-green mage will be an ancestor. The black-green mage reinterprets green's responsibility to the ancestors as a responsibility to oneself. The people living around the black-green mage become insignificant as all focus is devoted to creating conditions in the future for a rebirth of a life of power and control. Assuming that the energy in black mana comes in some sense from stealing from blue and green, a black-green mage will have to steal more and more from blue to compensate. Twisting the blue ideal of perfection, of the constant striving for answers which only serve to bring up more problems, serves this purpose. With the focus being a far future rebirth, the black-green mage will never be satisfied that their work is complete. The plan is to inundate, to flood more and more forests, creating more and more swamps. But that means creating forests where there are plains, where there are mountains and where there is a sea.

Thank you for these videos as always! It’s definitely a fresh and beautiful expression of the color pie. (Maybe one day, Black/Green will grow out of other people’s expectations and show what it’s really made of.)

Thanks. Awesome and fulfilling as always.

While im no fan of math i do very like the flavour and concept of quandrix ( was also my result in the test). Green represantation of nature not neccessarily in terms of living nature but more like natural laws like physics.

your videos are always so well done. great stuff! Lorehold became a lot cooler to me after watching this

Witherbloom was so close to perfection if they had just focused on going all out with the Food mechanic. Their secondary commander was already a cook and cooking is the manipulation of deceased ingredients and nature's boons in tandem to create something nourishing. Life and death, consumption and creation. I like Golgari but abundance isn't the only theme one can tackle with green black, if anything Witherbloom could have been the opposite, pruning, culling and natural selection.

I am so fascinated by Lorehold, it made Red/White something other than soldiers.

I think green/black could have leaned into a medical school theme to do green/black without doing golgari again

What's interesting in my case is that I firmly identify as mono-red. You'd think then that Lorehold or Prismari would be the colleges I'd pick, but I love writing more than any other subject, so Silverquill is where I'd feel most at home (I even have an English degree). Though, if I could, I'd enroll in Silverquill for writing, then enroll in Prismari to explore more about my mono-red nature, as I view my writing as an art as much as I do my passion. That, and Mardu is my favorite wedge, so... yeah. Good times.

The colleges are a perfect example of flipping the primary color of the pair to create a new methodology. Golgari, for example, is Black/Green while Witherbloom is Green/Black.

The new "co-narrator" is great.

Glad you had the other magic creators voices on this.

Lorehold is my college because of the archeological affinity.

I don't know anything about MtG, but I play D&D and Strixhaven looks really cool for that

as someone who started playing in the Return to Ravnica set and became fascinated with the colors and their relations with each other, I really want to know what new perspectives other Strixhaven color combinations would bring to the table.

Our man really made this video the avengers of mtg lore, nice

Has a history an English graduate I'm not surprised I got lorehold on the test. Your not wrong about the school. Love the fresh new look on red an white.

Love your videos ever since I began watching your channel! Have not finished watching this video yet (I like to take notes) but would you - or any dear fellow viewer - tell me what track plays during the Witherbloom section? It is haunting, beautiful, rough yet graceful. It's endearing.

I’m bummed that WotC hasn’t explored my favorite part of my favorite duality (BG), and that’s the Predation aspect of the color combination. You could’ve had a school of “jock” mages that use nature to enhance their bodies and make them ruthless athletes. Football, where mages are using Deathtouch to remove the members of the opposing team. Where they use Rancor to give themselves a boost on the field and drive through opposing lines. Focus it on Auras and Removal. Think Tonya Harding meets survival of the fittest.

Silverquill are my favourite idea for a bard, or well apart from a dancer. I love poets as a bard. With Witherbloom I always wonder something, how would you do something else with green/black. I know there is something different there as seen in how different the other collages are from their guilds but I don't know what that college would become. Finally I wonder what the allied colleges would study if they existed

What would you suggest as a more unique way to look at Green+Black?

I feel like a spin they should have tried with Green/Black is taking environmental studies but blended with other social sciences like economics, sociology, political science & philosophy, looking at systems and how they form and interact. They believe in our nature defining us and the principles of self interest, those are cornerstones of a lot of concepts across those fields that could have made for a really interesting angle instead of just nature+acknowledgement of decomposition

Honored to participate in such an interesting video!

Kinda a bummer that there’s no blue-black, but then again they’re more secretive so it makes sense for them to not get involved with something as social as a college. It’s hard for me to narrow down one color combo, I feel like I see a bit of myself in almost all of them, but I’d say Blue-Green and Blue-Black are my main ones. Blue-Black is just an interesting way to play since it’s basically the TKO type but as far as ideals go it’s still pretty neat because it’s basically Smart Rouges and Dream Demons. Green-Blue on the other hand is making the most of what you’ve got and taking it to the highest level, which I absolutely love in concept (Even though I hate math)

I loved it o.o

On the one hand, I love math so Quandrix is a easy choise. On the other hand, im a big scp fan, so Containment breach is easily my favorite card, wich is Witherbloom.

I think I'd go to the Silverquill college and join the Rakdos Cult. I might even find some Prismari people there too. My brother would most likely go to the Quandrix college and join the Simic Combine.

I kinda disagree with you on Witherbloom here. While the colors themselves may not have seen many new things, this is actually a very fresh take on the colors combined. Lifegain is a primarily white thing. Golgari does get pretty homogeneous, but Witherbloom is a breath of fresh air for people that are getting tired of abusing their graveyard or playing the typical graveyard strategy that golgari is known for.

Hey man! I just got into the color pie and I've been getting really excited about applying it in my D&D game. I am looking forward to the Strixhaven book for 5e and wanted to do the test you had available on your website, but it seems it isn't there anymore for some reason. Will we be able to take this test in the future? (Every other test I found on google kinda sucked :P)

Thanks.

So… what would you do with the other 5 color combos?

prismari seems more red than blue and izzet feels more blue than red

Nice

Yay

It’s bizarre; in Ravnica, I more align with selesnya, but at strixhaven, I would immediately sign up for quandrix. What would you make of that?

This video's section on Quandrix has managed to trick me into liking my least favorite color by pairing it with one I'm largely neutral towards. At least, as far as the ideologies of those colors go; mechanically I think I like them each a bit more.

Everyone _always_ covers Quandrix last 😔

Winterbloom on deep level is a lot diffrent than Golgari. They work with life cycle when Golgari reverse it.

15:55 okay seriously, why are they named as the squid people from splatoo? they are pretty much the opposite of them in every way.

I think I am a Red-focused Prismary.

Hey das me!

Whoever is reading the flavor text sounds EXACTLY like someone I know…

They can give white all the "identity" they want, it's still the only color that continually gets fucked-over by the refusal to let it draw cards while every other color draws with ease. Lots of great white cards in Stryx, doesn't matter at all when you draw 1 to the other color's two-to-three. They even stole lifegain from white and gave it to golgari; those are some of the best lifegain cards ever printed, and white's last remaining niche just dies a whimpering death.

:)

All the colleges are great, all 4 of them... what is a quandrix’s?

When watching this Solarpunk came to mind. Do you think Solarpunk would be B/G, B/G/W or..? Edit: *U/G, U/G/W

Maybe now that Quandrix is doing Simic better than Simic we can get better mechanics from that guild. +1/+1s are such a boring way to describe evolution.

After being excited for new G/B support i was...thoroughly underwhelmed. and saying that, silverquill I really liked, and thought was really cool and new.

Quandrix students are just physics and math majors

Strixhaven seems closest to what Earth would be if it were utopic and magical. Ravnica is more likely what we're to become 😔

I didn’t really like strixhaven. I think the ravnica guilds did it better. I think the interpretations in strixhaven were a bit of a stretch. The ravnica guilds felt natural.

Quandrix is just as bad as witherbloom lets be real

Nice