Well, you probably saw that I already talked about it some in the Tribal Report for this set. We've occasionally gotten sets designed generally around a card type, starting with Antiquities in 1994. We'd already seen this done to some extent with all of the permanent card types, but I'd been waiting for a set that did this with instants and sorceries. I've always thought that part of the appeal of Magic is this fantasy flavor of being a planeswalker and casting powerful spells. A Shivan Dragon is strong, but a Fireball to the face is more direct. A Mahamoti Djinn looks powerful, but a simple Counterspell can solve a problem on the spot. For Strixhaven, WotC answered the longstanding lack of a spellcasting-themed set by building a world centered around a school of magic.
The five colleges have distinct identities that make sense in the context of the world, and this set's secondary theme of enemy-color pairings does provide some belated help in correcting the imbalance between those color pairings and the allied-color pairings. The colleges of Strixhaven feel like very different takes on those color pairings than the guilds of Ravnica. I think that WotC did a fine job of making those color pairings a theme in this set while also giving them their own identity that doesn't look like a copy of what they've done on other planes.
There are some duds, for sure, but this set certainly seems powerful and has its share of bomb rares to build around. I can already imagine Accomplished Alchemist in a lifegain deck, looping Journey to the Oracle in a lands deck, filling the board up with pest tokens using Sedgemoor Witch, etc. Also, I like pretty much all of the elder dragons in this set.
I definitely don't think that it's the most dull set since Homelands. I do have some criticisms of it, though. The set's not perfect. I don't care for the "Learn" mechanic. I worry that the "Magecraft" mechanic is broken (Chain of Smog has already spiked to above $13 because people plan to target themselves with it and copy it repeatedly for infinite magecraft triggers). For my taste, too much of the power in this set is weighted toward permanents with abilities that deal with casting or copying instants and sorceries. I'd have preferred a set that loaded more of its power onto the instants and sorceries themselves. There are some big ones (Culling Ritual, Solve the Equation, Plumb the Forbidden, Semester's End). But they could have done better. I'm also not a fan of MDFC in general, but WotC had already decided on that as the unifying mechanic for the Standard sets at this time. I suspect that this set might have a lackluster Limited environment, but with the pandemic still going on, I almost certainly will never actually play a normal Draft or Sealed game with Strixhaven anyway, so I don't care too much.
Not everyone is going to like every set, but I'm a bit surprised that out of all the sets in recent years, this would be the one you'd find extremely dull. I thought Ixalan was rather dull, and Amonkhet was even worse. I don't think any set since the shift toward WotC's "Philosophy of Fire" has really been dull, although I do see some disconcerting problems with that philosophy and worry about how that'll affect the future of the game. The problems with Strixhaven are more of the same on that front.
