- cross-posted to:
- digital
- cross-posted to:
- digital
Snippet of the Alchemy changes:
After five more years of development, the issues Alchemy was created to address are simply not as much of a factor anymore. MTG Arena has various nonrotating formats for cards outside of Standard. We release more sets per year than in 2021, and our growing number of formats offers significant variety for Constructed players. With these problems no longer pressing, Alchemy’s role has become less clear. So, we want to focus our attention on delivering new sets and our growing formats like Brawl.
How Will This Work?
Digital Cards
Digital-only Alchemy cards will remain on MTG Arena and legal in Historic, Timeless, Brawl, and Competitive Brawl. Several of these cards have become staples in their respective formats, and some have even been printed as physical cards in Mystery Booster releases. We like these cards, and I am proud of our work on those sets and think they are a fun and important part of Magic’s history.
We may choose to ban or rebalance digital-only Alchemy cards in the future as we manage the formats they are a part of. We have found this to be an effective tool for these digital sets.
Alchemy: Reality Fracture is the last Alchemy release planned for MTG Arena.
Rebalanced Cards
On September 22, over 200 rebalanced versions of tabletop Magic cards will be reverted to their original printings across all formats. Those cards will match their tabletop versions in all formats where they are legal. This means we will update the banned card list for various MTG Arena formats, as many of these cards are significantly more powerful after being reverted. I’ll discuss these more later in this article, but here are the relevant changes to those banned card lists:
Historic
- Galvanic Discharge is banned.
- Guide of Souls is banned.
- Nadu, Winged Wisdom is banned.
- Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord is banned.
- The One Ring is banned.
Timeless
- No changes
Brawl
- Nadu, Winged Wisdom is banned.
Competitive Brawl
- No changes
Timeline
- September 22, 2026: All rebalanced cards with tabletop printings will be reverted to their original printings across all formats. The new banned card list changes for Historic and Brawl will take effect.
- October 13, 2026: Alchemy: Reality Fracture will be released. Additional sendoff events are scheduled to celebrate the Alchemy format, including a massive preconstructed deck event featuring all Into the Future decks from the past.
- February 2, 2027: The Alchemy format will be removed from MTG Arena with 2027’s rotation alongside Nauctis: The Sunken Realm Prerelease events. This includes Alchemy Play, Alchemy Ladder, Alchemy Constructed, Alchemy Direct Challenge, and the Best-of-Three versions of these events.
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I think we all figured this was coming, Alchemy has never been super popular, even when it was originally introduced, and the extra burden of commissioning art and designing/testing cards is probably not worth the effort now that there are 6-7 Standard releases a year.
There’s also the fact that there wasn’t really a meaningful reason for digital-only cards to exist. Yes, there are effects that only work or are only practical in digital-only formats. But there’s not enough designs that are sufficiently impactful or differ significantly from non-digital mechanics to justify making new cards with every set.
Is the benefit of perpetual lasting in the graveyard/hand/library good enough to justify using it over the much more supported +1/+1 counters? Does conjuring a card really feel that different from creating a token copy of a card? The only mechanic that felt like it was truly doing something interesting and fresh were Drafting cards from Spellbooks, but the massive variety of cards made it hard for your opponents to predict what cards you had. I feel like revealing the card you drafted would have alleviated this issue. I think there were also some good uses of Seek, Intensity and Conjure, but not enough to overcome the burden of acquiring new cards for another format
Rebalanced cards sounded great in concept, but the reality of having to remember two cards with the same name and art but slightly different stats/effects was just confusing. Glad that they’re reverting all changes in Arena going forward.
Ultimately, Alchemy was a solution in search of a problem. Sure at the time it was introduced there weren’t as many formats and the meta was slower, but simply working on adding more existing cards/formats probably would have been a better use of their time. And eventually those problems solved themselves anyways.
I think the concept of Alchemy is cool, doing digital only mechanics. I also think Alchemy is horrendous for the paper only people trying out MTGA, getting bombarded by broken ass cards you never knew existed
I’ve always felt that Alchemy was overwhelmingly complicated, even in digital-only. I agree it’s a cool concept, but Magic has enough crazy interactions, replacement effects, and trigger-storms as it is; adding wild stuff like permanent alterations to cards in hand/library just makes the game state inscrutable.
I hope they introduce alternatives to Historic and Brawl that exclude them, since I’d love to play those formats without Alchemy cards.
One of the issues with digital design Alchemy kept running into is that even if you can design more complex cards/effects due to the ability of the computer to track it, doesn’t mean you should. The game is still played by humans after all, and the players need to be able to have a mental state of the game or else it feels too random.
Can a player track the odds of drawing a Lightning Bolt when several were conjured into the deck? Will a player remember which creatures in the graveyard had perpetual modifications without obsessively checking every turn? It’s a lot of mental load for things that don’t really matter as much as more easily trackable on field effects
Yep, this is exactly what I meant when I said the game state becomes inscrutable.
