Tasha's, Class by Class - Wizards

 So, the game I DM is on an odd alternating schedule - it's on Mondays one week and then Saturday the next week (essentially, it's every weekend, but either right at the beginning of it or right after it) and so the 9-day stretch between sessions after a Saturday game is always interminable.

And we just got a new D&D book!

So I'm going to go through, class by class, the new features and subclasses. I think I'll be going in reverse alphabetical order to switch things up. So we start with the Wizard!

New Class Features:

New Spells: There are a number of new spells available to Wizards in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. Of particular note are all the new "Summon" spells, which are great. In addition, a couple of PHB spell have been added, namely Augury, Enhance Ability, Speak with Dead, and Divination. Likewise, some reprinted spells from SCAG and Rime of the Frostmaiden are also added here.

Cantrip Formulas:

Wizards, starting at 3rd level, can now swap out cantrips merely after finishing a long rest. What was once a one-time choice you had to commit to is now something you can easily swap out without any need to research or anything. Pretty cool!

Subclasses:

Bladesinger:

This is a reprint from SCAG, but while they mention that it began as an Elvish tradition, the racial restriction has been removed.

I'm not going to get into everything about every subclass, but the basic gist is this: you get light armor and proficiency in any one-handed melee weapon. You have a feature called Bladesong that increases your AC and your checks to maintain concentration by an amount equal to your Intelligence modifier, and a couple of other benefits, which you can do a couple times a day (based on your proficiency bonus, which is nice as this will scale regardless of if you multiclass.)

You will probably still want some Dexterity and Con to survive in melee combat, especially because you can't use Intelligence as your weapon attack ability. The overall concept for the class, I think, is that you can be a melee wizard, kind of approaching the Eldritch Knight Fighter from the opposite direction. You get Extra Attack, and can actually use a Cantrip in place of one of your attacks - a good time to use something like Booming Blade or Green-Flame Blade.

It's worth noting that with Bladesong, even a modestly Dextrous Wizard (say, with +2 to Dexterity) that then focused everything on Intelligence would actually wind up with a pretty solid Armor Class - with Studded Leather, +2 to Dex, and +5 to Int, you'd be sitting at 19 AC, which is better than a Fighter in full plate with no shield.

Order of Scribes:

This Wizard subclass is all about making your spellbook a major part of your gameplay.

You can manifest a magical quill that lets you write (and doesn't need ink,) which also allows you to copy spells into your spellbook in a tiny fraction of the time it normally would take (only 2 minutes per spell level - I think by default it's like an hour.)

But the real headliner is that your spellbook becomes magical in a few ways, eventually allowing you to manifest an intelligence from the book that acts a bit like an intangible (and thus unkillable) familiar.

The whimsy factor for this subclass is top-notch. Addtionally, its capstone feature allows you to avoid the damage of an attack by removing spells from the book for 1d6 days - a pretty handy emergency button for a squishy wizard.

    So, that's Wizards. Two very different subclasses, each with interesting charms and implications. Next, we'll look at Warlocks!