I refuse to let Alchemy cards be a part of my MTG experience. I only play standard and brawl on Arena so this is only an issue in brawl but I just adamantly refuse to play Alchemy. As soon as I see that little "A" symbol I'm out, I concede, congrats you won, I'm gonna go play with someone else. I only play Arena to compensate for how difficult it is coordinating with my friends for in person games, brawl is already a step down from EDH, I can't tolerate making it even worse. So if you want an easy way to get your daily wins just play Alchemy, have fun perpetually conjuring and seeking, I'm trying to have fun here.
There seems to be increasingly little discussion in Magic: The Gathering circles that isn’t just some form of bitching about things that really don’t actually matter, which is a frustrating factoid that I’m tired of having to slog through. I mean, the reddits and twitters of the world will always be as they are, but it would be nice if I could stop having to carefully curate my feed in other places to stymie the influx of nerd rage. I do play Magic because, you know, it’s fun, and presumably, so do all these people.
There is a very deliberate reason I try to keep a tone of at worst concernedness on this blog when I’m talking about the game, even when I’m discussing things about it I don’t like, because I’m sure there’s enough horseshit already out there. The Absolute State of Magic discourse is, and has been for a long while, completely awful.
Anyway so there are new digital-only cards, and people are pissy about it. Again.
I suppose I have the luxury of not really being an Arena player on this one. Even in my pretty limited experience I’ve mostly played drafts, so I don’t really have the same stake that the “Magic Community” holds in the effects of Alchemy as a…format? Set? How exactly does this work? And…doesn’t Arena have enough silly formats? Like this thing still has Historic and Historic Brawl and half a dozen just-for-fun draft formats but lacks things like Modern, Commander or hell, even Pioneer. How much would Pioneer even take? I mean, sure, there’s like 16 full sets of cards between Arena and Pioneer, but you don’t need to add all of those cards.
I think there’s two main issues with Alchemy in general. Well, two main ones and one personal one.
The first Big Issue is the confusion it presents. Alchemy appears to be Standard, but with some cards rebalanced and some digital-only cards added. So far, 30 (?) cards have been revealed for the format to be added when it launches later this week, as well as 11 rebalanced cards already in Standard, and while they have gone out of their way to make it clear which cards are which and very clearly delineate what a rebalanced card looks like, there’s still going to be a level of confusion for players, especially those who go between Alchemy and regular formats- which, considering the nature of Arena, is going to be most people who play it. There are people who are going to activate Alchemy!Faceless Haven, forget it’s a 3/3 instead of a 4/3, and have it either not kill the creature it was going to on blocks or just miss lethal and lose the game that way.
(clearly I'm out of touch with Standard, because I thought the “only get birds if this was foretold” part was already part of the card.)
This is to say nothing of newer players. Magic is a game that already requires a ton of onboarding, with the intricate mechanics and interactions, things like priority (which is handled by Arena itself, to be fair), and the subtle differences between cards that already exist- e.g. whether or not a burn spell can go face or not (the latter being surprisingly common these days). Adding on this extra, slightly different format with a pile of new cards and making some of their other cards different is an extra layer of what.
(God okay no fucking proxy this in all your goddamn cubes this one is heat)
My other main concern is how this is going to contribute to the infinite spoiler season that is Magic today. Standard sets now already come with a set of regular cards, two or three (or more!) forms of Showcase frames, usually associated Commander precons, cards that are “for Commander” but only show up in Set Boosters or Collector Boosters, and assorted promos for things like FNM. This adds even more Stuff to every single set release, that drowns out discussions about other Magic topics, and keeps people having to pay attention to the new shiny thing when they haven’t even been able to properly get a hold of the last set of shiny things.
My personal concern, for what it’s worth, relates to non-rotating formats on Arena…and by that I actually mostly mean Arena Cube. My issue with Arena Cubes past is that due to being made almost entirely of Standard cards from the last few years, they’re basically just midrange power piles with not a lot of depth to the deckbuilding stage beyond “play the best cards in the colours you ended up in as long as you have a curve”, and that leads to a lot of samey matches. I’d like the focus of Arena Cubes to lean towards making them more like real, paper Cubes in their gameplay and variety, but I suppose WoTC has ironically never been the best at designing them in the first place- and I say that as a Legendary Cube apologist.
It also does beg the question of…what will other Arena formats like Historic (and Historic Brawl, and Cubes) do about the new and rebalanced cards? Historic already has a variety of digital-only cards from Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, but how about the rebalances? It would be utterly bizarre for one to be allowed and not the other, but that would mean taking an axe to a lot of the cards Historic players love. Some of those rebalance changes are…questionable.
Magic at least doesn’t have the issue Hearthstone had to get yelled at for years to solve, which was un-nerfing cards once they were no longer relevant. It wouldn’t shock me if all the rebalances were undid once they rotate out of Standard/Alchemy, though that would make them again weird in Historic. But Magic’s never had the ability to do nerfs before, owing to the fact that the cards are, you know, physical. So this presents a whole new axis for the game to work within, and one which people don’t really appreciate.
There are upsides to this, of course. I actually like a lot of the balance shifts, with the knowledge that these are designed tweaks for standard play- honestly, like, all of them make sense to me aside from Luminarch Aspirant (was that card really that good?), and I’m interested to see how these altered cards play out long-term. And there are, of course, all the new cards, with a pile of weirdo mechanics that feel very “we wish we could have done this for a long time”. Expedition Supplier is basically a nu-Arena style version of a custom card design I saw years ago, and I love it- not to mention the new Gitrog and Ishkanah (the latter of which I wish was Commander legal). There’s a bunch of interesting stuff for a bunch of interesting archetypes (though nothing new, is going to pop up, I think?), and im sure the format is going to play really well.
Alchemy’s got the whole community rioting like it’s the end of days, though I’m pretty sure that’s just because they Know No Other Way. I am, as usual, going to hold my judgment until we see more and/or see how the format plays and is supported. Just don’t expect people to take to it immediately.
