Strixhaven: School of Mages (STX) Limited Tier List

MTG Arena Zone’s Limited Tier Lists rank all the cards from the set, to assist with picking cards for your draft deck or building your sealed deck. Full written updates will be recorded in the changelog at the bottom, but Drifter regularly makes minor grade changes on the fly as well, so the Tier List will be up to date for as long as Strixhaven is the current set. Make sure to bookmark this page so you can come back to it later!

Legend

Who is rating?

• S: Ridiculous bomb: has a huge immediate impact on the game and threatens to dominate it if unanswered. Always 1st pick. (Baneslayer Angel, Emeria’s Call, Sublime Epiphany)
• A: Very powerful card: approaches bomb status, pulls you strongly into its colour. Usually easy 1st pick. (A+: Leyline Tyrant, A: Felidar Retreat, A-: Nullpriest of Oblivion)
• B: Great playable: happy to pick early, pulls you into its colour. After the first few picks, a signal. (B+: Bloodchief’s Thirst, B: Emeria Captain B-: Rabid Bite)
• C+: Good playable that rarely gets cut. On the wheel, can be a signal, especially in multiples. (Gnarlid Colony, Into the Roil, Thundering Sparkmage)
• C: Fine playable, sometimes gets cut. A few in the last picks of a pack can form a signal. (Tajuru Blightblade, Tazeem Raptor, Synchronized Spellcraft)
• C-: Mediocre playable or decent filler, gets cut around half the time. (Nimana Skitter-Sneak, Fissure Wizard, Blood Price)
• D: Medium to bad filler, gets cut a lot. (D+: Resolute Strike, D: Sneaking Guide, D-: Disenchant in most sets)
• F: Mostly to totally unplayable cards. (Roiling Vortex, Forsaken Monument, Negate in most sets)

Notes

• This tier list tries to capture “overall power level”. For more details, check out the mission statement.
• This tier list is primarily intended for Draft, but should still be useful for Sealed, with some adjustments. For more info, check out my General Sealed Strategy Guide!
• Two colour gold cards should be taken lower early on – you won’t be able to play them unless you’re specifically in those colours. The amount lower varies – as a general rule, take them about one grade lower if they’re splashable, or two grades lower if they’re not splashable (so a B-tier card becomes a C+ first pick). C+ is the hard limit for any cards in the B range, since C-level and below cards are very interchangeable, so a B- would still be on the lower end of C+. As always, it’s contextual though!
• Colourless cards should be taken about a grade higher early on, because they can go in any deck.
• Sideboard-only cards are rated as though they would go in the maindeck i.e. they usually receive bad ratings. Make sure to check out the sideboarding guide if you’re playing best-of-three!

Limited Set Reviews

This tier list is derived from our in-depth limited set reviews and should be accompanied together along with their explanations for each card.

Splashing

Splashing is when you play cards outside your main colours, and adjust your mana base to account for them – such as playing two red cards in your Blue-Green deck. Should I splash? The two cardinal rules:

• Is my fixing good enough? The better your fixing, the more you can splash – if you can splash two colours relatively freely, then go nuts – this usually means three or four sources for 1-2 cards; four is better if your main sources aren’t that demanding but you can get away with three. If you have as many as 5 or 6 sources, you can even splash earlier game cards i.e. I would not splash Lightning Strike often on three sources but I would on five. If your mana base is better, then the risk is lesser so you can afford to do greedier things (but remember that playing too many taplands has its own costs, especially for more tempo-oriented decks…). You can only really splash cards with a single cost outside your main colours e.g. it’s impossible to splash 3BB in a Simic deck, but you can splash 3BG, because needing two sources of mana at the same time is incredibly hard while splashing – the number of sources you need on average soars from 3-4 to 6-7 (7-8 in Draft, but Sealed is slower so you can incorporate a little more risk).
• Is the card actually worth splashing? Remember that cards you splash likely won’t be played on curve, so they need to be good in the late game and they need to be good enough to incur some risk to your mana base. Is the card you’re splashing significantly better than the card you would be putting in instead? It needs to be, or it needs to fill a hole in your deck i.e. if your Simic deck isn’t good at removing stuff, that makes splashing Secure the Scene, usually just an okay card, a lot more appealing.

Sideboarding

Generally, if you’re playing best-of-three, you should take sideboard cards over D-tier cards, assuming their good case is pretty common and you’re not low on playables. Sideboard cards tend to get worse in multiples, unless the “good case” for them is quite common. You might be surprised at how much can constitute a sideboard card – a 1/3 can be a useful sideboard card against a deck full of 2/1s, for example. Remember that after each game, you can click the top right button to view the board again, and check their graveyard and field for what cards they’ve played.

Drifter has written a whole article on this subject, so for more details or to check out his Limited Spotlight series, click this link!

Kaladesh Remastered Limited Cheat Sheet: Instants and Tricks to Play Around

Changelog

The changelog will be added to when written updates are posted!

• May 22, 2021: Prepare for the Strixhaven Draft Challenge: Drifter’s Format Analysis and Tier List Update
• April 16, 2021: First version posted, on the release day of Strixhaven.