MTG: Wizards Of The Coast Changes Magic Arena Forever With New Alchemy Format
Huge news for Magic: the Gathering Arena with the announcement of a new digital-first foremat launching next week.
Wizards of the Coast made a surprise announcement earlier this week that changes Magic forever. Magic: the Gathering Arena will unveil a new format, Alchemy, which cements Magic: Arena as a digital-first version of Magic: the Gathering.
Naturally, the internet is taking news of change to something beloved extremely well.
Comment sections aside, the news is exciting for Arena players. The new format comes with a few key “pillars of change” that help bring Alchemy into the modern era as a living, digital card game. From the surface, Alchemy looks a lot like Standard. It starts with a clone of the “Paper version” of Standard but has a few changes that make it a wildly different game.
Perhaps the biggest change is the news that Alchemy will regularly feature card “rebalances.” Rebalancing a card is a fancy way of saying they’ll patch the game. As of the WotC announcement, it seems that this will take the place of outright bans (which are frequent in Standard and Historic) as much as possible, as card rules are altered.
WotC previewed some of the proposed changes, along with the principles guiding them. You might see cards like Alrund’s Epiphany getting a nerf–now its foretell cost is the same as its normal cost, and it only creates birds if it was foretold, for instance.
But this is just one example of how rebalancing can take the place of a ban to bring cards to heel when they start to run away. The current plan is to rebalance the play environment every month or so, with a close eye on older cards.
The other big pillar we’ve seen so far is digital-only mechanics. We got a taste of these back in Jumpstart: Historic Horizon with some of the new Planeswalker power, but now it seems WotC is pulling out all the stops.
Alongside these new digital-only mechanics, a batch of Supplemental cards will be released about 4-6 weeks after a new Premier set launches. Alchemy and Historic will both reflect the new digital only cards as well as replace older versions of cards with the “A” (for Alchemy) symbol. All this, coming next weekend!
