- cross-posted to:
- mtg
- cross-posted to:
- mtg
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.
Wow legitimately cannot believe they’re ending Alchemy, I thought they’d double down forever on that regardless of how much the playerbase hated it. It’s refreshing that they’re beginning to listen. It was probably one of the reasons I stopped playing Arena sadly.
Side benefit: Scryfall will no longer continue to get cluttered by all the nonsense Alchemy versions and “rebalances”!
Standard is clearly king on Arena, I didn’t expect to see it at 50% of the constructed queues. Pioneer and Timeless are basically nonexistent :-/ I have to imagine once Pioneer gets the full card pool play may go up a bit?
I’m not sure if they were listening to their player base or just listening to the money. With Alchemy being unpopular and requiring extra art + dev time I can’t imagine they had any incentive to keep it going if no one was buying in.
Are there any major decks that are actually missing cards? I figured that they had added pretty much all tournament-relevant cards. But I think the bigger thing for online Pioneer would be more support for paper Pioneer to spur interest in the format.