 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and you may not know this, but I'm a wizard. At least that's what the large hairy man who broke into my house told me, and there's nothing I trust more than bears. But if I want to handle my wand without embarrassing myself, then I'm gonna need to study up. And for that, we need the new Unearthed Arcana set in Strixhaven Academy from Magic the Gathering. I'm gonna talk about the five new subclasses presented in this article, each of which was created for not one class, but for a group of classes. All of which are allowed to forego their normal choices in favor of picking their favorite house. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like magic schools are old and that the real money is in magic community colleges, feel free to play your games however you want. But before we begin, it's time for an ad! Do you like hunting monsters? 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Effectively changing nothing with how an individual class would get its powers, but still making bars jealous that wizards get all the AP classes. In addition, multiclassing doesn't allow you to take the same subclass over and over, so even if you're a bard that puts in those wizard hours, you won't get any extra credit for repeating the same courses over again. However, you can take a different Strixhaven subclass, allowing you to be an exchange student if you're the kind of player who has trouble with commitments. The concept of flipping the class subclass script on its head is amazing to me, because I've always been a big proponent that certain classes get too much love while others are left by the wayside, but with so many new source books coming out that every class has like ten different subclasses each, the game is starting to feel like it's producing content to fill a quota, and new ideas are getting harder to come by. Having the ability to create polyamorous subclasses means that the developers can just make whatever they want, and then give that subclass to whatever classes they feel like would fit, and that means that I don't have to take all of the features that come with a specific base class if the subclass is all I care about. Too bad that this concept wasn't tried out back when psionics were still in development. Anyway, that's enough preamble. I know you're here for the subclasses themselves, so starting off with the first college, we have The Lorehold, an academy for bards, warlocks, and wizards that prioritizes history and knowledge above all else, while also dabbling in necromancy for the specific purpose of talking to dead people and asking them what their favorite soup was. Getting a letter from the Lorehold Academy will grant you an ancient companion that inhabits a statue and will beat up bad guys to help your pursuit of knowledge. Depending on the type of ghost that you summon, your companion will have different powers that can heal you, protect you, or talk down to you like a doting mother. The Pokemon type will also grant you more power further down the line in the form of better healing and advantage on smart rolls or punchier damage spells. You can also wrap up a caster in their own magic to make them vulnerable to whatever they just casted, and you can eventually trip balls to go on a spirit journey where your mind takes a backseat to the will of the universe, granting you increased luck, damage resistances, or the fluidity of motion that no one can intercede. I don't know if I'm just not getting the references to MTG, but the Lorehold subclass feels disjointed. The first two abilities imply that this is going to be heavily focused on your old Spice Stone Man and whatever stand season, but the other two are just random buffs, one of which is actually a list of buffs that doesn't connect with the Lorekeeper theme in any particular way. They're not bad, except for the level 6 ability, which is stupid strong, but I just think that I'm gonna have a harder time picking a subclass that I don't get a solid vibe off of. Moving on, if you enjoy playing a druid, a sorcerer, or a wizard, and enjoy taking a single element and making your entire personality like an avatar character, then you need to join the School of Prismari. Prismari mages get proficiency in acrobatics, athletics, nature, or performance, and they turn the powers of ice, fire, or lightning into an art, granting additional powers when you take the dash action as a bonus action, like sweeping ice around them to knock people over, burning their surroundings in a heatwave, and zipping around on a wave of lightning to avoid opportunity attacks. Further abilities let you harness the elements to protect yourself and allies from fire, ice, or lightning, and you can deal additional elemental damage in either slow people, heal allies, or stun enemies, and your dex saves will become legendary as you learn to never roll a dex save lower than a 10. I've never considered the druid, sorcerer, or the wizard to be particularly mobile classes, and that's what I love about this subclass. It gives all three the chance to not be physically awkward nerds, but instead be nerds that can do a backflip. Plus, the chance to focus any of these three classes on a particular element is something that I've always wanted to do, and while the fire druid eventually got love in Tosh's book, everything else was just a pipe dream until now. This is a very good subclass. Speaking of nerds, sorcerers and wizards rejoice. Just for the quandrix school of math and magic, takes the already algebraic world of the clacky dice game and says, what if we just stopped pretending that we weren't always doing math this whole time? Scholars of quandrix take the powers of probability into their own hands, adding and subtracting a d6 from people that you cast magic on, as well as having an extremely touchy personal space that will literally teleport away anybody that gets within 30 feet of you. Plus, you can slide down the difficulty meter on someone's body, hitting them with the massive strength dex and attack penalties, and you can turn on noclip to gain resistance to physical damage and move through solid everything. This subclass represents the difficulty and the concept of polyamorous subclasses, because while the wizard will certainly get good mileage out of a subclass that forces tons of save or suck abilities, the sorcerer literally has a feature built into the core class that gives people disadvantage on their saves. Granted, setability will eat up sorcery points like their pack pellets, but like I said to my last ex, sometimes doing it once is enough. Either way, the subclass isn't broken by the strategy, so overall, it still gets my seal of approval. Now, if you liked my woody wordplay where I called my last ex impotent, then maybe you'd want to enroll in the Silver Quill College for Bards, Warlocks, and Wizards, where the power of the spoken word is the greatest magic in the land, supplying every student with either Sacred Flame, or the cantrip that you actually will pick, Vicious Mockery. Additionally, you gain proficiency in performance, persuasion, deception, intimidation, or insight, as you study to lay the verbal smackdown on some fools. Your words will flow with magic that can re-roll people's dice, exude a cloud of darkness that only you can see through and will physically choke out anybody that spends time in it, embolden radiant or psychic spells to charm people and frighten them respectively, and apply vulnerabilities to enemies while also magically absorbing some of the damage that your allies are about to take. None of these abilities scream, talk good, be good to me. And instead, they feel like holdovers from the math school and the elemental school. While it's not the easiest thing in the world to create a subclass based off of talking, it is telling that none of these abilities actually requires your target to hear you. In fact, most of these abilities rely on or inhibit sight, so maybe this was meant to be a different subclass entirely before it was reworked into Silver Quill? Either way, I'm not totally convinced on the gimmick. And finally, the only subclass that isn't available to the wizard is the School of Witherbloom, which dedicates its existence to the Wheel of Existence, Life, Death, and Rebirth. As you may expect, Druids are welcome at the school, as are Warlocks, and they will get to spare the dying can trip for their troubles, as well as both cure and inflict wounds. Witherbloom students can also call upon the power of Life or Death, letting them spend hit die as a bonus action to heal or transform their spells into irresistible necrotic damage. Furthermore, Withery boys get proficiency with Herbalism Kits at level 6, which is a weird place to put a tool of proficiency, but say levy. And they can use that Herbalism Kit to bubble up potions that will fortify those who imbibe them against elemental attacks, heal and restore anybody who drinks the tonic, or they can apply the cabbage stew to a weapon and wipe it off on their enemies to poison them. Further abilities include enhancing necrotic and healing spells, as well as mixing it up a little via healing people by dealing necrotic damage to other people in a sort of forced life transfusion. I find Witherbloom to be a bit on the nose with its abilities, but that's not really a bad thing. It'd be a weird criticism to say that something is too focused on its gimmick, although it is a bit basic for every ability to be some variation of this heals when healing, or this hurts when hurting. Overall, I like the Polyamorous subclass gimmick, although I by no means want this to be a replacement for normal subclasses. The main thing that stuck out to me while reading through this article was that not specializing in one class restricts the amount of synergy that you can have with certain class's abilities. You can't pull from bardic inspiration or sorcery points or do anything with wild shapes, so every subclass has to either stifle itself with rule restrictions, or it needs to bring its own new mechanic to the table, which would be a much cooler thing to do with the subclass, but it seems that only the Prismari subclass seems to have figured that out. As for the schools themselves, Lorehold College needs some focus, Prismari College is fantastic, Quadric's College should watch out for exploits, Silverquill doesn't know what it wants to be, and Witherbloom was out of ideas before the end of the page. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and be sure to support me on Patreon so I can burn this letter to Hogwarts as an active turf warfare. But yeah, Davy out.