My side story for the upcoming Secrets of Strixhaven set, “Off the Record,” is finally available to read online! I’m so excited by all the speculation this is causing. Red string sales have skyrocketed. Silver fox jokes abound. My delight levels are over nine thousand.
Every time I write for Magic: the Gathering, I have these dueling impulses. How do I make something that fully embraces the depth and breadth of lore in the multiverse, while also feeling personal and accessible to me, living on our planet, in our time?
When I was asked to write this specific story, I read and reread all the Strixhaven material I could find to see what might be cool to include. There is so much! And yet there are also many gaps and unexplored places, names that are mentioned but not explained, dangling threads begging to be woven into new parts of the larger tapestry. Not to mention things that amused me to invent whole cloth. Who wouldn’t queue up for a Void to scream into?
Since this focused on a Silverquill character, and specifically a journalist, I really wanted to dig into notions of how words can be manipulative. They can inspire, and they can insult. They can reveal truth or obfuscate it. A glance at virtually any news headline today, clickbait or propaganda or otherwise, is ample proof of the ways we bend words and phrases to alter perceptions of reality.
The same can be said for photography, which I have somewhat casually invented an analog for among the Prismari students. The angle of a picture, what is included and what is left out of the frame, which precise moment is captured in a series of connected moments, what context is known or unknown about the subject—all of these things and more can manipulate the viewer in a multitude of ways.
There are so many additional psychological challenges that come into play as well, the intricacies and fallacies of logic and argument that Silverquill students would no doubt be trained to understand and use themselves. People are fallible, and sometimes the most fallible of all are the ones who think they know all the tricks and are immune to them. Being good at reasoning can also make you very good at rationalizing and lying to yourself. Social engineering can be more dangerous than any machine.
College students in particular can be extra susceptible to the kinds of manipulation that prey on their unique hopes and fears. We all, on some level, want to be admired for our skills, and are often positioned to be rewarded or punished for our performance by authority figures. Teenagers can be both malleable and fragile, learning and growing and developing their senses of self as they figure out the adults they want to become. The desire for positive feedback and in-group status can lead to some very bad choices indeed.
Silverquill is also fun for how its color combination manifests. One of the school’s core traits is ambition, which can be a positive force, pushing you to do better and be better for noble purposes. It can also lead to crab mentality, to climbing over your peers and kicking them on your way up so they can’t excel more than you. It can be cooperative or competitive, invigorating or soul-consuming. It can make you take dangerous risks for the elusive promise of praise and prestige, even if your intuition—or your Prismari friend—is warning you.
You may notice I’m dancing around discussing the new professor Ral Zarek and his role in all of this. Guess you’ll have to buy your own red string and start a murder board about it.
The main story for the set should be arriving later this month, so stay tuned. You can also preorder Strixhaven: Omens of Chaos by the inimitable Seanan McGuire, which comes out in April. If you do, you’ll get a special Strixhaven Command Tower card to add some mana to your pool.
Until then, as the Silverquill might say: may your style be sharp, and your wit be sharper.
