Add another art to the eye horror list with Deathmark and Fevered Visions

You can also get it out early with Geode Golem, but that’s the only way to cheat it out in colorless I believe

Going straight into my Kathril deck for sure!

Yeah, you’d have to remove this creature, or use destroy/exile effects on Planeswalkers

I don’t think it’s possible to have negative loyalty since it’s tracked via counters

Vigorbloom is kinda horrifying all around

So without the Phyrexians, Koth would have just been a happy dad hanging out with his kid on a farm…

Instead… Poor guy…

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.

I have to imagine once Pioneer gets the full card pool play may go up a bit?

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.

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.

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

Lotus token

Awww yeah, Izzet Prowess was what I ran when my LGS had Pauper nights. It’s a great deck, great at pulling out wins right before you’re about to lose.

Glad to see Peek as well, such a great little tech card.

I was wondering why Narcomoeba got the pre-emptive hit until I looked and saw that Pauper has its own version of Oops (Almost) All Spells. Somehow, all roads lead to Balustrade Spy

Strix seems really good for Grixis affinity but at the same time Vandalblast seems really bad for every form of affinity. I don’t remember if there are any affinity builds with White in it, but I can imagine they’ll pop up now with Dispatch

I knew that they were going to be highlighting Hexhaven but I’m a little disappointed at how much of the story it seems to be occupying. I didn’t really need or care to know about their entry and graduation requirements (especially since it’s not really actually real?). Hopefully there’s more info about the wider Echoverse in the story

Hydra, Kraken, and Phoenix each printed in a single color they’ve never been printed before

I would have said Red for Hydra but the very first Hydras started out in Red. Maro has mentioned that Krakens/Leviathans are very Green in nature and only Blue because of the water connection, Phoenixes seem like they’d fit into White/Black with the self-reanimation

new restriction for whether a cycle of dual lands enters tapped

Interesting, I expected that they would have done the ally counterparts to the SoS lands given Hexhaven, but it seems there’s an entirely new set of lands

prepared spell that’s a red version of a popular blue instant (the color it should have been in)

My bet is a Red version of High Tide

“that many 5/5 red Dragon creature tokens with flying are created instead.”

Red version of Divine Visitation it seems. I wish they’d make a Green version given that they’ve said they want Green to focus on big tokens more than lots of small tokens

Legendary Creature – Homunculus Scout

Echoverse version of Fblthp?

Omnipresence

Green version of Omniscience but letting you play any number of lands instead of spells?

Rescue Girl, First Responder

Heh, sounds like an inverse version of Massacre Girl

Yoshimaru, Scrappy Stray

He just can’t catch a break in any universe :(

More spoilers can be found on Scryfall (currently 21/121 cards spoiled)

I think the most common punishers for hitting multiple artifacts are Dust to Dust, Gleeful Sabotage, Ancient Grudge and Gorilla Shaman. If you need to hit the Indestructible bridges in particular, DtD still works but you’d have to go with Deglamer for Green or Cast into the Fire for Red