March 29, 2024

Okay, so I get Strixhaven is part of the MTG/D&D crossover and as such gives WotC a chance to experiment and play around with expectations, but with the release of the Mages of Strixhaven UA, I just have to put this out there.I hate it.
In theory, I love it, the idea of subclasses that work with multiple classes is to me a great and flexible idea, but unfortunately 5E isn’t built around such a concept and as such, it just breaks for me.
Class balance in 5E isn’t perfect, hell having gotten more into subclass creation I can only tell you how frustrating I find it that Bard’s only get 3 level features and so when they’re paired with a class that gets 4, the bard is going to miss out and with Strixhaven they do.

The problem here as I see it, is that Strixhaven introduces something that is pretty cool, non-class specific subclasses is something that I would be excited to see, if we had a system that was built around them I would absolutely love to see it, maybe not in a MTG crossover but in general I think it would be amazing to have.
But we don’t have a system built in mind, so it doesn’t balance well, with some classes having to forgo class features and continually feel underpowered compared to it’s other brethren.

Maybe WotC are going to use this UA to do a settings specific re-work of classes, which might even go so far as to be a 5.5th or 6th Edition, and that would be pretty cool in itself.
But everyone knows I would rather have more settings books than adventures.

As it stands, I just am not excited about the UA, but if you want to see a reddit thread that details the awkward balance in the Mages of Strixhaven UA, click here.

1 thought on “Mages of Strixhaven – I have.. thoughts

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