The "digital-only" format was a huge misstep and I'm glad they're finally correcting

Today in Wizards of the Coast's State of the Formats blog post, they announced a few things but the notable one is that the Alchemy format is being retired.

I'm not objective here. I know this. I accept this. I am pretty happy about this change and trying to be normal.

For those who don't play Magic on Arena (or who have no idea what I'm talking about at all) Alchemy's original intent was twofold; to allow for rebalancing of cards in some formats without having to resort to bans, and introducing "digital-only" cards that in theory, couldn't be (or would be massive pain in the ass to be) done in paper formats.

This introduced mechanics like "perpetually" where some effect might give a creature card +1/+1 forever, even if it was in a graveyard, your hand, if it got shuffled back into your deck. That's obviously really hard to prove / track etc in a paper game, I get it. I don't like it, but I get it.

Another major one as "conjuring"; numerous Alchemy format cards had effects that conjured up new cards; Oracle of the Alpha is a great example; just casting this creature put the banned "power nine" cards into your deck. Black lotus, moxes, time walk, etc etc.

Or cards like Thunderbond Vanguard which, in any token-creation deck becomes a waterfall of bullshit FAST because it turned all new tokens into itself.

The tricky part about all of this is that from a format standpoint, Alchemy was supposed to be "its own thing"...except the cards were also legal in Historic - the primary format were cards outside of the current Standard rotation were legal.

Overnight when Alchemy launched, Historic turned from "All paper cards available on Arena (with some bans in place)" to "oh and all this weird new stuff that has unpredictable effects, oh and some of the cards are now different from their paper versions". For example, it can be really annoying to remember that in Historic, Orcish Bowmasters for example does not deal the damage / amass on entering the way it does on paper or in Timeless:

I've also gone on at length about the Heist mechanic and how much I fucking hate that shit so like I get it, I'm predominantly an alchemy hater and I can accept that!

Yet every time the playerbase complained about Alchemy, the answers were one of the following:

1. Play Standard (ok, but now your constructed card pool is limited to recent sets only)
2. Play Timeless (Ok, but now you're in a format with a power level that's looking at turn 2-3 gg's)
3. Play Limited (Ok, but what if you want to play with cards you already have and not draft?)
4. Concede and move on

The fourth one is probably the most controversial I've seen in the Arena communities; like realistically yes, for any reason at any time if you're not enjoying what the opposing player is doing you can and should quit and move on with your day - but there's lots of pushback because (especially in Ranked) that's effectively rewarding players taking advantage of the mindset. It doesn't really matter in the scheme of things but telling players "eh just give them the win if they're playing bullshit, otherwise tough it out" is not often received well! Especially from people specifically asking for an alchemy-free way to play Historic or Brawl, the latter being the closest to a digital version of Commander that's currently available on the platform.

So today's announcement: after the upcoming Reality Fracture set, there will be no more Alchemy sets, and probably more importantly cards that were rebalanced by Alchemy will be losing said rebalances, reverting back to their paper versions. That by itself is massive in terms of how much Wizards was really against banning cards in favor of rebalances but it looks like they at least do understand that with the rebalances going away, so must some of the problematic cards.

Here's the full list of rebalances getting a ban if you didn't read the article:

I've probably got a whole separate blog post in me about Arena's problem with pushing players towards Bo1 play while only balancing for Bo3 but it's worth at least pointing that out here; cards like Sorin and Guide of Souls / Galvanic Discharge are fully handle-able in Bo3 but they often dominated Bo1 so it's kind of huge that they're commiting to the bans.

Also as someone who had the worst RNG luck with getting paired up with every person playing the same Sheoldred / One Ring / Orcish Bowmasters decks before the original One Ring rebalance to make it cost extra mana to tap, I'm so fucking happy to see that card gone. Even with the rebalance it's annoying as shit and knowing I'll never see it again will let me revamp my sideboard to not explicitly need exile-specific artifact removal or damage prevention overrides.

Oh, and Nadu? Yea. Fuck Nadu. All my homies hate Nadu but that's been true as this guy was almost like pre-banned and rebalanced as soon as the set released.

I don't often see eye to eye with a lot of people who play Magic, and especially people who play Arena but there has been this unified "Dude what the fuck even is Alchemy??" that was constantly pushed back on by Wizards and it's nice to see the experiment is over.

Though, worryingly, this means that un-rebalanced Vivi might be back and that's not gonna be pretty.

We'll see what happens!

Anyway, thanks for reading. Here's your end-of-post cat; his name is Trout and he would never focus a cheese deck around Priest of Possibility.