Wizards Of The Coast Introduces Alchemy, A New Digital Exclusive Magic: The Gathering Format

Wizards of the Coast will now support Alchemy digitally-only after playing with the mechanics of Magic: The Gathering Arena cards. The new format, along with everything it entails, will be available on December 9. 

Alchemy relies on Standard and the yearly rotation of its sets. That means when the time comes for a year’s worth of cards to drop out of Standard, they will lose legality in Alchemy as well. A pool of Arena-exclusive cards will be created a few weeks following each Standard-legal set’s launch. This means that we will see new digital cards almost every month. Players will find these via Alchemy booster packs or by cashing in wildcards like any other card in Arena. Our first Alchemy infusion will play off of the most recent pair of Innistrad sets and is called Alchemy: Innistrad, bringing 63 cards into the client. Most if not all of the cards will feature rules and mechanics that are more at home in a virtual card duel than at the kitchen table. 

Jumpstart: Historic Horizons introduced Arena players to mechanics like Perpetual, Seek, and creating non-token spells out of thin air; rules that make permanent changes to cards, find cards in your library without the need to shuffle afterward or go around the deckbuilding considerations of the game. This space will see Alchemy again. You’ll see creatures that will affect cards drawn on the turn to reduce or increase a spell’s cost, or ones that may care about who took the first turn in the game. New rules word, “draft”, will be similar to Hearthstone’s Discover. It allows players to add one or more cards from their hand (chosen randomly out of a larger pool).

The second huge change for Alchemy is the addition of rebalanced cards with different text or mana costs from the originally-printed Standard card. This idea was demonstrated during the Mirror, Mirror summer event. For example, the green artifact Esika’s Chariot, which has been a strong force in Standard for months, will now have a lower Crew cost but will enter the battlefield creating one 2/2 cat token instead of two. The Alchemy format will be technically unbanned since Wizards have now the option of rebalancing problematic cards. Cards will instead be adjusted to the appropriate level of power. Omnath, Locus of Creation, will be 1 mana more costly to cast now, with its abilities slightly diminished. 

The rebalanced cards will be available separately from the original printings. They will have an Arena “A” at the bottom and the spell name next to it at the top. This powershifting of cards won’t just be a tool to bring down a strong effect but is being used to make cards better as well. Cosmos Elixer (see below) now includes a Scry 1 trigger to increase its life.

Historic and Historic Brawl will allow cards introduced via Alchemy and rebalanced to be added to the legal system. This means that these formats are still available to you to enjoy all your digital collections from the past few years. MTG Arena will soon be available for the Alchemy alternative Standard and Alchemy: Innistrad.