Thank goodness Magic: The Gathering is not doing a Harry Potter crossover set

5 years in the past, Strixhaven: Faculty of Mages confirmed us Magic: The Gathering’s authentic tackle the wizard college style, which covers the whole lot from Discworld’s Unseen College to A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin—although clearly Harry Potter is the elephant within the room.

Again then, Wizards of the Coast hadn’t gone all-in on the crossovers. Now we have had the whole lot from a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set to a restricted run that includes Dwight from The Workplace. It was affordable to marvel, after Wizards of the Coast’s company proprietor Hasbro introduced a partnership with Warner Bros to “carry the Harry Potter universe to life by licensed toys and video games,” whether or not that meant Magic could be one of many autos for that train in cross-branding synergy, or regardless of the executives name it lately.

However no. As an alternative, Magic is returning to its personal setting for Secrets and techniques of Strixhaven, a sequel set that checks in on the scholars and school a number of years and one multiversal warfare later to see how they’re doing. And, although I’ve loved Magic’s crossovers like Center-earth and Warhammer 40,000, I am glad they’re taking a break from them this time.

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Strixhaven has so much to suggest it over Hogwarts. For starters, it teaches topics apart from magic. Whereas your historical past professor would possibly summon a ghost to ship a visitor lecture on occasions they lived by and your biology trainer could be an precise druid, Strixhaven’s courses embrace mundane topics from artwork to zoology. You are going to come out extra rounded than somebody who has experience in Protection Towards the Darkish Arts and Potions however has by no means taken a math class of their life.

It is also a college relatively than a highschool. The scholar wizards are all younger adults relatively than largely kids, which makes the actual fact they find yourself in thrilling magical peril on the common a bit extra OK. After e-book after e-book of the Hogwarts workers pushing their college students into life-or-death conditions, it is troublesome to see Dumbledore as a kindly outdated avuncular fuddy-duddy, relatively than an incompetent legal responsibility who ought to have been fired years in the past.

The age distinction additionally makes the 5 faculties, Strixhaven’s equal of Harry Potter’s homes, appear much less merciless. Every faculty represents a broad discipline of examine, like Prismari’s deal with utilizing elemental magic to boost the visible and performing arts, and importantly they’re chosen by the scholars themselves in the beginning of their second 12 months relatively than being persona designations arbitrarily assigned by one magical bonnet.

There is no quidditch both, and the equal sport of mage tower, which is about enjoying keepaway along with your opponent’s mascot, has a scoring system that is not paper-thin absurdity. However at this level I am nitpicking. Actually, the rationale Strixhaven is a extra enjoyable tackle magical college tropes is that it is self-aware sufficient to make enjoyable of the entire thought.

If you begin studying Harry Potter it appears like a parody of the British boarding college system, one thing shut in spirit to the good murderer college bit in Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids, however the longer the collection goes on the extra apparent it turns into that Harry Potter is definitely a celebration of boarding college nonsense—it simply learn like parody as a result of it appears unthinkable somebody could possibly be in favor of separating kids from their households to make them bear an authoritarian proving floor to arrange them for the category system.

The actual fact Strixhaven wasn’t created by a transphobic nutbar is admittedly only a bonus. Secrets and techniques of Strixhaven might be obtainable in Area from April 21, and on tabletops from April 24.