Hey Mark! I’ve noticed a lot of content creators have mentioned getting into Magic around RTR and/or Innistrad. I also hopped in around that point, which is part of why hearing this a lot has stuck out. Was there something unique in that period that might have had that result? Is it just that we’re in a certain point in a cycle of players? Or is it maybe all just confirmation bias on my part?

There’s no correlative data showing that time period had any spikes beyond the normal slope at the time. Confirmation bias seems likely.

Hey Mark, I am pretty disappointed at first glance in Strixhaven, which is a shame as I was highly anticipating this set. Maybe how mystical archive works is the magic sauce needed to make it click together. Maybe the spell copying is more frequent / better then I expect, but I currently dislike the design. I am definitely going to give it a try with an open mind though.I feel its very much not an instant and sorcery matters set really, and is very much a token set. I get that was done to increase the ASFAN of instant and sorceries, by making some creatures into spells, but mentally I still count them as creatures as that's what they actually are. As a Johnny/Spike most of what I am interested in the set has been concentrated in these spells, and they are essentially french vanilla creatures. And it feels like we are missing a lot of spells I would have expected to make these tokens good. For one very specific example, I would have expected a counterspell at least as good as Cancel at common.In addition the magecraft triggers are so highly creature focused, which means I naturally want to play fewer combat tricks and rely on magecraft to do that job. Instead the set feels like it's giving me more combat tricks to make tokens better, so I just double up and magecraft becomes boring, as it feels a lot like I am just playing with landfall again.Is there something I am missing?

The key to making any theme work is creating the structure that can let it shine. Maybe in concept a set that’s just nothing but instants and sorceries, none of which make creature tokens, sounds intriguing, but it lacks the things you need to make an environment dynamic. Strixhaven is structured to make instants and sorceries matter in ways they don’t normally get to, and while landfall for spells might sound like just a tweak of landfall, it’s not. All I can recommend at this point is to play the set. You seem to dislike things theoretically, but they exist that way for good reason, even if you don’t understand why yet. After you play write back and we can talk.