Intro

This cube is a re-imagining of Strixhaven's limited environment. Many of the ideas from the set have been expanded upon, such as adding flashback and MDFCs to all colors' shared mechanics, the inclusion of more Wish effects in addition to lesson/learn, and strong build-around instants and sorceries such as Splicer's Skill.

Draft Guide Archetypes:

Heroic
Life Gain
+1/+1 Counters
Cheat
Flashback/tokens

Design Notes

I tried to keep the archetypes in the spirit of the original schools, but wasn't able to with all of them. Witherbloom lifegain is effectively untouched, although their sacrifice theme was, uh, sacrificed. It may be possible to bring the sacrifice theme back, using Food as a bridge between them.

Heroic was a natural fit with Silverquill, as they already had elements of a go-tall strategy.

Prismari still cares about big spells, but now it does that by cheating them out rather than by acting as control to slow the game down until it naturaply gets enough mana. It was difficult to stick with spell-matter payoffs that only cared about the first spell, this will be easier in the future with blue as "once each turn" becomes more common, but it will remain difficult in red due to the change with Lorehold.

Quandrix, with their love of math, now focuses on +1/+1 counters. There was already a bit of this before with the fractals, but WotC mostly avoided it due to associations with the Simic Guild, but keeping the distinction between those two factions is less important in a cube, and +1/+1 counters play very well in limited.

Lorehold is the most changed, as their midrange speed and graveyard theme didn't quite work out in limited, and since it was so different from WR's typical approach that means we have a shallower pool of cards to try and make it work. I managed to keep the graveyard mattering by increasing their density of flashback spells, but the cost of that is that it's back to a typical WR aggro deck. In the future I hope to find a way to turn this back into a midrange strategy.