I’ve been sorting through my original Strixhaven cards this week, getting them ready for Secrets of Strixhaven to slot in next to them, and I hit the same problem I had back in 2021. My Arcavios binder is split across five colleges like a high school transcript. A dozen Silverquill bits. Six Prismari rares. An embarrassing number of Witherbloom commons from a precon I bought and never broke up.
If you’re a player, five dual-color colleges is a great design. If you’re a collector, it’s an invitation to sprawl. You either build across all five and watch your binder spread in every direction, or you pick a Strixhaven college to collect around and let the other four drift.
Secrets of Strixhaven makes that choice harder than the first set did, not easier.
The aesthetic pick vs the commander pick
Setting aside reprint density for a moment, there are really only two ways to pick a college.
The first is aesthetic. What colors do you love? What mechanics make you lean forward? If you see a card that’s clearly Prismari, with the stage-lit elemental art and that dumb joyful chaos of an Izzet spell that draws you six cards for no good reason, and you get a little dopamine hit, that’s your answer. The aesthetic pick survives shifts in power level. You collect the thing you love.
The second is commander synergy. Which legendary creature do you want to build around for the next five years? If Dina, Essence Brewer in the new Witherbloom precon is already rearranging your brain into Persist loops and +1/+1 counter chains, Witherbloom is functionally your answer. You’ll acquire everything you need for the deck and the collection will drift that direction on its own.
These don’t always agree. I love the Lorehold aesthetic. I’d sit on a pile of Boros graveyard-recursion cards forever. But Quintorius, History Chaser isn’t my favorite planeswalker commander, and I’d probably be a more engaged player with Zimone, Infinite Analyst even though Quandrix doesn’t give me the same visual pop. I’ve been wavering on this for about two weeks and I don’t think I’m going to resolve it before the weekend.
Where the five colleges actually sit right now
Current price picture on the college-head mythics from Secrets of Strixhaven, which is probably the cleanest proxy for collector demand:
- Witherbloom, the Balancer, around $17
- Prismari, the Inspiration, around $13
- Quandrix, the Proof, around $8
- Silverquill, the Disputant, around $7
- Lorehold, the Historian, around $7
Witherbloom is almost double the nearest other college, which tracks. Green-black sacrifice with lifegain may be the most universally beloved Commander color combination going. It’s got format penetration across every mode of play, the Balancer is a legitimately playable card outside its own precon, and the precon itself ranked well in our earlier review. Prismari sitting at a steady thirteen is the other one that surprised me a little, until I remembered the original Galazeth Prismari and Rootha decks, and this is a college that’s had a five-year head start on being beloved.
The three in the six-to-nine range are where I’d actually start thinking about a deep collection project. Upside is easier to find when the floor is low and the mechanical identity is still distinct.
A tangent about Quandrix
I keep getting stuck on Quandrix. The +1/+1 counter and X-spell package is maybe my favorite kind of Magic gameplay, and the Increment mechanic in Secrets of Strixhaven gives the college an actively good new reason to build around it. Zimone is under three bucks right now, which is nothing, and Quandrix, the Proof sits cheaply enough that a themed Strixhaven-symbol binder of green-blue cards is basically budget collectable.
When I look at what naturally slots into a Quandrix build — Birds of Paradise, Simic Ascendancy, old Kami of Whispered Hopes from the Kamigawa set — a lot of it overlaps with Commander decks I already own. Which is the constant problem for Commander collectors: at some point the “college binder” and the “good stuff binder” converge, and you’re just organizing by what you haven’t sleeved yet. I wrote a whole post about what happens to a rare binder after 20 years, and the theory of clean taxonomies does not survive contact with real collecting.
The college I actually think holds up best
If I had to commit to one Strixhaven college in 2026, I’d pick Silverquill. I know. It’s the weakest financially. Killian, Decisive Mentor is a fine precon commander, not a breakout. Repartee as a draft archetype is fast but shallow. So why.
The whole college is built around words as physical magic. The art direction — the inkwells, the calligraphy pens, the Japanese-ink-painting black-and-white duality — is the most visually distinct thing in the entire set. That ages better than a slightly-better mechanic. A binder of Silverquill cards is visually coherent. A binder of Quandrix cards is just green-blue cards that happen to have a dean on them.
Orzhov is also going to benefit disproportionately from the Secrets of Strixhaven reprint ecology. The Library of Alexandria and Sylvan Library Special Guests are already shifting the broader market toward exactly the lifegain/drain/aura space Silverquill lives in. Even if Killian never pops off, the fringe singles that accumulate in Orzhov piles are going to be the quiet winners of this set.
At the original Strixhaven Prerelease back in 2021, I got assigned a Silverquill pack at a shop in Brooklyn, went 1-2, and lost round one to a Lorehold player who kept flashing back everything he cast with a serene, almost religious expression on his face. I left the shop grumpy and swapped to a Prismari deck for the next FNM. So some of my current affection for Silverquill is probably just me revising my own history. I’m aware of that and I’m doing it anyway.
Let me contradict myself
I just spent two hundred words recommending you collect the weakest college financially, which is objectively strange advice. If this is your first serious MTG collection project and you want a sense of momentum, Witherbloom is the honest answer. Strongest commander. Best-selling precon. Most color-pair support leading into Marvel Super Heroes in June. I’d probably tell a new collector friend to go that direction and I’d mean it.
The spoken version
Look. Five colleges. Pick one. The worst case is you stick with it for three months, bail, swap to another one, and your binder ends up with a bit of Witherbloom and a bit of Prismari and that’s fine. That’s how my old Khans-and-Tarkir sorting went, and I’m still finding Abzan cards in shoeboxes I forgot I owned. It doesn’t ruin anything. Just pick a starting point and don’t overthink it. You’re going to impulse-buy a Prismari precon in two weeks anyway.
The one actual test
Sit in front of your binder. Pull every card that’s clearly from the college you think you want to pick. If you have zero, you’re lying to yourself about which one you actually like. If you have more than twenty, that’s your answer and you don’t need me.
If the test is genuinely ambiguous, collect whichever college you pull most on release day. Your first weekend of Secrets of Strixhaven packs is going to bias your pile one direction whether you like it or not, and you might as well follow the cards. I pulled a Witherbloom mythic in my box this morning, so against my own advice three sections ago, Witherbloom might be my 2026 college after all.