You'd also probably "safe" money (=spend a less insane amount) by doing that, cause Arena in general seems so stupidly expensive to me, especially everything involving tickets and limited... it seems they just took the paper prices and tried hiding them behind some predatory currency, hell I get angrier the more I think about this...
my dislike for alchemy is based on the suspicion that developers are likely holding back interesting cards from the paper set in order to drive microtransactions when they release them a month or two later digitally
Oh man. I didn't even think of it that way. As I said in the vid, I had assumed it was time away from development. Didn't occur to me Alchemy might just be cut content sold back at a premium. Gross
designers have been pretty clear that ideas are not saved to be used for alchemy cards. for example, legendary creatures from the story with alchemy cards but no physical cards would not have cards at all if not for the alchemy sets
@@screamcollectorso if they didn’t save cards to release digitally they came up with a few new card ideas with art and play testing in a month. It’s possible but I’m not buying it.
All Alchemy exclusive cards include abilities that cannot be replicated in paper magic, or that are no longer allowed to be made in paper magic because they are too hard to track. They all either have perpetual, make a permanent change to a card in all zones, or use a mechanic that only works in digital like "seek." The only exception to this is "boon" cards, which grant a one time use trigger the next time it happens in the game no matter how long from now that may be. Boon is the only mechanic that could be replicated in paper but they won't print because it is too hard to track. Literally every card for alchemy has a digital exclusive ability according to those rules. They pad out the rest of the alchemy boosters with cards you could also pull from the base set.
The weird thing is: i play alchemy every few days but only ever until i finished the daily quests. After that there are no more rewards and it's not fun enough on its own to hook me. I can however play EDH for 6 to 8 hours every sunday without getting bored of it. Something is missing online, the social aspect of course, but there is something else. This goes for deckbuilding too, it's somehow not really satisfying in Arena.
I mentioned in my lastest video there's something about opening a bucng of cards that's very satisfying that digital just doesn't capture for me. It just feels good to hold and shuffle a physical deck
It's THG. That's what's missing. It was a blast back in DotP times. But they couldn't implement it in Arena because there is no chat function. And there is no chat function because of cross-platform compatibility. There's so much potential in Arena, like other formats, cubes, and everything, maybe even custom cards, but mobile gaming is holding it all back, forever.
Same boat regarding alchemy for the most part, but one thing you might not know given not having touched arena in a while: if you want to play non-standard brawl (their commander lite mode) in order to play your favorite commander who isn’t in standard anymore, you are FORCED to play alongside people playing alchemy cards, some of which are immensely annoying and pushed. Ps; as for ‘any mechanic in alchemy can be made on tabletop’ I would argue the ‘draft from spellbook’ mechanic unless you allowed people to bring extra sideboards of just the cards from that cards spellbook.
So, I guess spoilers for my thoughts on a video I haven't made yet. But my current thinking is something akin to Garth One-Eye. I'm not saying it's perfect as I haven't done the work yet. But off the top of my head I'd either do something like that, or maybe even Urza, Academy Headmaster (though I wouldn't use a website. I'd do it on a reminder / token card like the old transform ones that contain block text)
@@bestaround3323 the card that most gets my goat is a 4 mana 4/4 which basically reads ‘whenever a land enters play under your control make a copy of it” and then proceed to include a fetchland for a total of 4 mana ramp.
I don't like being "that guy" but it feels like Wizards/Hasbro are giving up on the vorthos crowd. Not that they aren't producing the plot or developing new characters or worlds but they are shoving characters like Davriel, et al, into the corners to make room for UB content and exclusive alchemy products.
@@RedBobcatGamesNot strictly correct (ignoring limited) - Explorer is a 'cut down' version of Pioneer - supposedly the intention is to eventually have all pioneer cards available, but apparently this is a process that will take 'years' (for some reason... couldn't possibly be to do with trickling out high power staples keeps the money flowing... nah that couldn't be it ;) ) - so that's a second format that evades alchemy. But Historic/Timeless and Brawl all incorporate Alchemy, which sucks...
Not counting the ones you mentioned, some characters I’ve lost to the evils of Alchemy are Jarsyl, Crucias, High Marshal Arguel, Teysa’s ghost version, Vona in her Anti-Pope form, Saint Elenda’s second solo card, MY BABY BOY OGLOR! The most insulting ones are the ones with “Starting Intensity”, because the Alchemy version of Minthara flat out tells us that it’s just a slightly tweaked version of experience counters, cause the paper Minthara uses bloody experience counters.
Perpetual can, in certain circumstances, be very hard to keep track of in paper, and the fact that alchemy cards will just sometimes create new cards becomes impossible to deal with as soon as those cards might get shuffled into your library. Like, you would have to have a bunch of extra sleeves for your deck and a bunch of extra cards you don't mind defacing... Seek is fairly possible to do but you have to change it significantly. What seek actually does is that it chooses a random card with the property and puts in in your hand, so you would have to go through every card in your deck and separate out all the ones with the property, shuffle that pile and put one in your hand, and then you have to put all of those cards back into your library in the original order they were in before you sought and then mind wipe yourself and your opponent to forget the order of your library. I suppose this is technically possible if you just have a trustworthy neutral third party to do the seeking for you but it's very silly. I don't think that you're suggesting this, though. I assume you mean to modify the meaning of seek so that it is possible in paper, but the thing about seek that's impossible in paper is that no matter what, you would have to show the card you sought to your opponent to prove that it had the quality, so it's not actually possible.
I will tackle seek at some point, and if it takes doing something dumb then that's what it takes. I suspect I'd bend the rules to make it work a little cleaner but so far I only have a frame work rather than a full fledged rule set. The not revealing the card does present an interesting challenge I hadn't considered. I guess we'll see how I overcome it when the video comes out
Why would you need to do all that for seek. It would just work like cascade. reveal cards from the top until you reveal a card with property x, then put it in your hand and the rest on the bottom in a random order
For my buddies and I, when we play with seek, we play "reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a card with the indicated property, then put the rest on the bottom in a random order." It's not by any means perfect but it's not very time consuming.
They have. The Gitrog Monster, Kiora, Sarkhan, Teyo, Davriel Kane, Bo Levar/Crucias, Daarigaz, Emmara, Freyalise, Garruk, Arguel, Jarsyl, Ishkanah, Niambi, Roalesk, Slimefoot, Tajic, Tiana, and Tibalt all have either appeared in paper before or have appeared in old stories of the game and have some arena incarnation.
@ulavala3798 If I remember correctly, at the time Gitrog hurt too as it had been so long since we'd seen it. And it seemed to have been messed up by the Eldrazi. I wanted to know more but... nothing. And now it's back as a mount by Thalia? Who even knows what's happening over at WotC anymore
Arbitrary "rebalancing" of items and gameplay is what ruined Path of Exile for me. I put countless hours into fine-tuning character builds that were abruptly terminated by wholesale revisions of the game by its developers. At one point, they demolished the entire concept of dual-wielding weapons, immediately disarming several of my legacy character builds. That was the final straw for me.
I know I keep banging this drum. But leave old cards alone. Don't make Hounds into Dogs, because now I have a bunch of cards that don't list the correct creature type. Infuriating. And if Companions were such an issue that the rules needed to be changed, maybe they shouldn't have gotten past the playtesting phase?
Oh my god. Yes. Yes it would. This fact is like a soothing balm on my anger. Thank you, as I imagine WotC will get bored of Arena sooner rather than later
what got me into magic was arena, it's free to download, you get things from playing, magic in itself is fun (since i never got to play irl i don't feel the diference between seeing and not seeing mt opponent in the face) and i fell in love with the story and the characters, i love biulding brawl decks (because arena doesn't have commander) around my favorite characters and alchemy cards are legal in there in playing them, they don't make that feels bad moment just seeing them makes, seeing an obnoxious card get nerfed is kinda healthy, though maybe you don't get to be obnoxious with it, most of the rebalances are still playable, and after they leave standard (the ones that are ok in older formats) get back to how they were originally printed this is my vision having never played magic physically, i live in a small town where there are no lgs and the most played card game in school was ygo so the playgroup of tcg players don't like magic though i agree with your point about the cards being shoved in alchemy for hell knows what, i wish they were printed in paper as well, but on arena they don't make that bad of an impact on the game as the internet shows, at least it doesn't feel like that to me, and on the game itself, i can't feel it too,
Good points. And I'm pleased something like Arena exists so people can experience magic online if needed. Have you ever considered a webcam game? As I understand there's a few online communities that jam games over discord. Only thing I'd want to argue with is that... it's not that i disagree that nerfy cards is healthy. I guess my perspective goes back to before Fire design and I'm of the opinion that cards shouldn't be developed that need to be nerfed in the first place. I wish they'd put more thought and time into sets overall. If you don't mind me asking, have you spent any money on Arena? I've always thought that "free download" games are insidious as they're usually the worst ones for trying to get you to spend and not think about it
@@RedBobcatGames no, i have NEVER and will never spend money on arena, the biggest reasons are, if i'm gonna spend money on magic it might as well be on real cards, and the other is that arena is too expensive for me & my country, they don't regularize the cost for other regions, so a 20$ pass which is ok on a dollar basis, becomes a 100R$ thing, that's almost 10% of the minimum wage here. also with the way drafts work on arena, if you get good enough on it, you can just go infinite, i have more than 15k gems and 10k gold stored so i do not need (nor will) spend any money any time soon i do agree with the fire design point you make, khans and shadows over innistrad came to arena and almost none of the cards in there are really playable outside of limited, only the ones that are and have always been busted like dig through time and the fetches, but it's the only examples i have since i wasn't playing before 2020
God! I didn't know that they don't change the conversion rate for currency! That's mental! Good for you for managing to keep playing without spending though, well done. Also gutted to hear Shadows isn't playable any more... bad sign for that upcoming Innistrad Remaster
My perspective as someone that primarily plays Legacy/Vintage who got into Arena to play Timeless (Gotta play all the formats built to give broken cards a home) is that Alchemy is... okay? There are very few Alchemy cards that're playable in the very competitive card pool of Timeless, where Oko isn't even good enough in a lot of games. There's a lot of them I've grown to like because they're an interesting twist on a card that I already enjoy. Kami of Bamboo Groves is an Arboreal Grazer with an interesting second mode that helps deal with blood moon/field of the dead. Bind to Secrecy is an incredibly versatile card in a Dimir control shell since it's negate at worst, but lets you do things like hold up a counterspell and steal an opponent's creature from their graveyard on endstep if you don't need to counter it. I think Alchemy is good when they use it to do interesting things/new takes on general card archetypes that have proven playable and people like that would be inconvenient/unwieldy within the rules of paper Magic. To me, it's just them taking advantage of Arena having greater control to do things like that. Re: the balancing? I don't know. Timeless has all the "real" versions of cards so I can't comment. There's a few I do sincerely wish were paper cards, but a few I think were them trying a bit too hard to show what "new" things they can do with the power of Alchemy. Like any Magic releases, there's going to be weak ones or cards that nobody likes. Not every card can be a hit, and with the smaller card quantity/greater attention from critics Alchemy gets, I think it's a little overhated for a few relatively minor design mistakes. Fragment Reality + Leyline was pretty silly, but I can't say it's not a bigger design mistake than something like Hogaak lol.
Yeah, all that sounds like a fair analysis of how they are mechanically. I couldn't say myself as I haven't play, am only aware of them in concept. I think it's a shame they split the player base the way they do. Again I'm reminded of the reason they gave as to why we can't have the 3 block sturtcure any more. These Alchemy cards aren't for everyone, and if that's a reason we can't have other things, why is Alchemy the exception? I have to assume it's money. Alchemy cards are more easily controlled due to their digital nature, which I supect they wanted to result in more direct sales. If I had to guess
Man, I really feel your argument that Alchemy cards are non-collectable. I have a Legendary cards collection (need only about 100 Legendary cards to finish the collection), but when I first saw these Legendary Alchemy cards I kinda got discouraged to continue this collection (I also got over it) because I saw Legendary MtG cards that I could never actually add to my collection, but they're still Legendary MtG cards. I considered proxying them briefly but as you said, why not proxy everything at that point? I really hope they'll print these "Alchemy only" cards in paper somewhere in the future
I don't think you are correct about every Alchemy card being printable and having the same effect. Seek alone is a nightmare. How can you find a random card from a subset your deck without choosing it yourself, without revealing the card, without revealing to your opponent the entire contents of your deck? You'd need a judge to perform the entire operation. And generating nontoken copies of cards from hidden zones into new hidden zones is also a nightmare. I think they did something similar to Perpetual with sticker cards, but I've never bothered to play with those, because even that sounds like a pain. As for owning the cards in a binder as a collectors thing, does your set of Innistrad really feel incomplete without Alchemy: Innistrad cards? I think that making proxies of the remaining unobtainable cards would be perfectly valid, yeah, if all they are doing is sitting in a binder being owned. I dislike Arena for a lot of reasons, so I play MTGO and paper instead. Honestly though, I don't have beef with any specific Alchemy cards. It's the design team getting used to "Print broken stuff and nerf later" hearthstone methodology that can bleed into paper, and oops, can't nerf those cards. Shouldn't have let the Alchemy team work in the same room with the main team!
I'm not a fan of proxies for a collection (my own that is) purely because as soon as I proxy one card the spell is broken, and I might as well proxy all of them. Which sort of defeats the point in the collection (again, for me at least) And you're totally right about the way Alchemy cards are designed. I really feel like we're starting to see their design philosophy creep into paper. It's rough. Oh, as for seek. In fairness, I never said it wouldn't suck to do in paper. But there are a few ways I can think of. Admittedly they involve changing the mechanic, but again WotC have done that themselves several times when converting cards from digital or older wording. It can be done again
@@RedBobcatGames I believe if you change Seek cards to tutor cards, they become entirely new cards. So if you print them that way you haven't actually printed the seek cards. That's the difficulty in that
@Kryptnyt True, but then just don't print them as tutors. They'll be more complicated, but like you say truer to how they work in digital. Just not exactly the same
You know it’s crazy that 5 years before arena came out hearthstone almost perfected how a card game should be monetized. There’s one single currency and when cards are ever nerfed they give you a 100% refund of the card if you choose to. Then they also offer you a single player experience to win cards that you can use in your multiplayer experience. More people would probably play mtg arena and by extension alchemy if they had just better practices at hand.
@@RedBobcatGames I would also agree with you since this a paper game and it physically exists. It’s sad to see only a select few cards not getting printed because “reasons”
I play Cabaretti Revels in a lot of decks on Arena and its very frustrating that doesn't exist in paper, its effect wouldn't need much tweaking to work in paper but jokes on me doesn't exist. Years later and I'm still struggling to understand who alchemy is for, drafters don't like it because some of the cards are way overpushed for draft (Emporium Thopterist is the most recent example), collectors don't like it because they can't own these cards, historic brawl players don't seem to like it as many of the most frustrating commanders like Poq, Rusko, and the Davriel in the video come from alchemy, and standard players can't use the cards so all they can do is look longingly at them in their collection. Historic and Alchemy are both small queues people skirt around playing because they don't want to spend more wildcards filling decks with cards that can't use anywhere else. And obviously people who like the lore and just want a card of their favorite guy or more cards for their favorite faction aren't happy that these are digital only cards that aren't gonna get printed. Nobody wants these cards to keep coming out and I don't understand why they're still being released every set.
I honestly did not expect to have so many comments that share my thoughts on Alchemy. It's nice hearing from people who've had more experience with it break down exactly how they feel about it too. I think the answer to your question though is the Hasbro board room members. That's who Alchemy is for
Me and the boys on Reddit have workshopped my favorite Alchemy Commander Jessie Zane Fang Bringer to no avail. Jessie Zane is 3/4 Human Assassin for 1GG from Thunder Junction who says “Whenever This card enters or you cast a snake spell conjure a card named Ambush Viper into the top 6 cards of your library at random. It perpetually gains when this card enters draw a card” It’s such a fun deck. Basically it’s a snake tribal mono Green Storm deck. The Ambush Vipers have a mana value so your wincon is usually using Nykthos Shrine to Nyx, Nyx Lotus, Growing Rites of Itlimoc, or Three Tree City along with a cost reducer like Defiler of Vigor or Urza’s Incubator to go infinite then summon an overwhelming number of snakes with death touch, to draw your whole deck. With plenty of Cheap 1 mana Fight spells to punish any Opponent who dares to fuck with your board. It’s like Jhoira Weatherlight Captain Except with way stronger board presence, 10 times more removal options, and does not rely on paradox engine or expensive artifacts or cyclonic rifts.
Alchemy cards are not designed by the main set team. They are designed entirely by the arena team that works independently to the main design team. So no design efforts are spread thin for alchemy, also they don't print characters that had no room in the main set in alchemy anymore because of the blacklash. Also Davriel is one of my favourite characters because of the alchemy card, his voicelines are amazing and the card is fun.
But, if the people who worked on the Alchemy cards didn't need to do that, they would still exist and work at the company. They wouldn't just do nothing, they'd be given another job to do. That was my point. I didn't know Davriel's card had voice lines though. That is fun. What kind of accent does he have? Does his voice sound like it fits him?
Speaking of voices, I am so curious about quintorius' voice, it would prob so funny a human voice with an elephant accent, such a bummer we didn't get it yet...yeah we prob will get bamboozled and never get his voice
@suddenllybah I barely looked at the paper cards for MKM, I certainly didn't look at the Alchemy ones, so I would also be interested to learn if that's the case.
I can see where you’re coming from but I disagree with a lot of your points. Alchemy is just one flavour of magic available on arena, it’s definitely no one’s main game mode so picking up cards just to play alchemy that then get nerfed is going to be fringe cases. There’s a lot of alchemy cards that just don’t work in paper and a big part of the fun is seeing cards that take full advantage of their digital medium to do new things. Stuff like Oracle of the alpha clone and arming gala copy are some of my favourite decks for casual online matches with my friends. As for the social aspect, arena is just one part of magic and isn’t meant to replace the tabletop experience.IRL magic will always exist. But sometimes I’m ill and I wanna play standard draft on a Friday night but don’t want to trek to my local shop. If I want the social aspects I’ll play commander but when I’m playing modern that matters less. Monatisation aspect wise, arena is actually pretty generous. You get free alchemy copies of all the cards you own, you can earn gold pretty efficiently. I play red sligh in historic and I haven’t had to spend a penny and I make it to diamond each season.
Thank you for the polite comment. It's nice to be disagreed with in such a pleasent manner. I think you're right for most of what you said and can see it your way. Two things stuck out to me though, first about Alchemy cards not working in Paper. As I said in the video, I don't think that's the case. BUT to prove it is going to take many many many hours. Feel free not to take my word for it because I've offered no evidence yet. I believe it can be done though. The other thing was about how Arena isn't to replace tabletop magic. No, but Alchemy is. Because you literally can't play Alchemy in person currently. If I want to play with an Innistrad Davrial Cane (which I do), I can't unless I do it via arena. The tabletop experience has been replaced. Glad to hear about the money side of it though. Like I say, I don't play. But I raise an eyebrow at that store and it's prices.
@@RedBobcatGames I am looking forward to seeing your series on potential ways to bring alchemy mechanics to paper magic because I think that’s an interesting thought exercise. But for things like perpetual and especially conjure that add additional cards to the deck or alter properties of cards in the deck.
@aliceporter6239 It won't be clean I suspect, but like you say it's more of just a thought exercise... kind of powered by anger. I'd honestly just rather the cards didn't exist honestly. But that's not limited to Alchemy, I feel that way about of lot of recent cards designs. Oko springs to mind currently. I guess my general feeling toward the game sometimes is "I don't know what this is any more" and it's frustrating
For what it’s worth: Davriel wasn’t even alchemy. It was a few months before alchemy even existed. And it was also before Innistrad midnight hunt was printed. He’s completely unrelated to alchemy the format or its cards. And I’m definitely on the “if you want to, just print out those cards and play with them” train. Alchemy cards are still magic cards. Made by magic designers for magic the gathering. Just play the cards you want to play
That weirdly does make me less angry at alchemy. But also, it's clearly a digital only card. Are there other non-alchemy cards exclusive to Arena? That's wild
@@RedBobcatGames Davriel was in Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, in late august 2021. It featured a lot of mh1/2 cards as well as 31 digital only cards. There was a cycle of planeswalkers, of which davriel was the black card. Manor guardian (which you mentioned might be Crunchgnar), and davriel's withering were also in that set. The rest of the cards you mentioned like rahilda and gutmorn were in Alchemy innistrad.
But, he's still an Alchemy card though? Just from a different set? Was Jumpstart Historic Horizons an all Alchemy set, or have they just fully blurred the lines on Arena?
@@RedBobcatGames no he's not an alchemy card. He was printed months before the format existed. He was never legal in the format. JHH was a arena horizons set, sorta like the original jumpstart, or like any other horizons set. it had a mix of reprints and new to the format cards that bypassed standard.
@@JayIsADino I had totally assumed that all arena exclusive cards that take advantage of the digital format are arena cards. Wild that they aren't really
I enjoy Alchemy, but my card playing stopped being social about a decade ago when I got sick and a lot of my playing has been through online card games like Eternal or Hearthstone (although I never actually played Hearthstone, just has more name recognition than Infinity Wars or Mythgard). I also stopped caring about the Lore of Magic the Gathering mostly after War of the Spark for for realisies this time after March of the Machine, so Alchemy's affect on it that you bring up have never really occured or registered to me. Having said that, I enjoy the cards that get printed for it. One of the games I have played in the past that I really enjoyed was Hex: Shards of Fate (put so much fucking money into that dumb kickstarter, shame on me) and my favourite card in it was a pirate that cost 2U and when it came into play you got to put a creature back into opponents hand and increase the cost by 1. Alchemy just keeps giving me that mechanic every set, I get a new card for that deck. Rusko brough back my favourite card from the Strixhaven standard period in the form of Midnight Clock and made it even better (some would say good but I say those people are weak and it was always good!) People complain about the bird that does the power 9, but i actually enjoy playing with the power 9 and its the only chance I have ever had the oppurtunity to do so. My point is, its fun. Yeah the card nerfs are annoying, but also I appreciate that it keeps the meta fresh and stops it from getting as stale as standard has been for the last three years. I have long ago decided that active errata is better than bannings. Though the points made in that aspect are valid and I wish there was a better system, but I think ultimately that complaint is just an extension of Arena's economy is absolutely dogshit (The worst of all the games ive played, and ive played a LOT). So yeah, I think enjoying alchemy is a hot take, but im personaly glad it exists. I think they learnt a very valuable lesson when they did the baldur's gate reprint alchemy thing where they chagned up the cards. That was also a terrible idea and youd think this massive company could shell out for new art. I think using physical art on alchemy cards is a BIG no no because recognising card art and mechanics has been something that has been learnt over 3 decades, and I do hope to see more of it in the future. But I dont think its a bad thing that so many people dislike it because there are many valid reasons to, many of which you outlined.
Thank you! Also, I'm just as surpised as you to be honest that liking Alchemy appears to be the hot take. I honestly expected more push back from being negative about it. Especially as I don't actually play. I'm glad that people like yourself comment though. I'm glad you enjoy it and get something from it. And it's always good to hear a different perspective. If I hear it enough times my hatred for Alchemy may even subside. Maybe. Perhaps. And then I think about the empty spot in my binder where Davrial should be... nah still pretty angry actually haha
@@RedBobcatGamesI feel like proxies answer the question there. Why NOT fill that slot with a nicely printed proxy? If its just for completion sake, to fill the binder so you can flip through and enjoy it, why you letting something as dumb as "officially printed by wizards" stop you. If THEY wont print it, YOU will!
@WizWiteKnight Oh that's easy! Because I am an angry spite fuelled person empowered by the rage of looking at an empty slot haha. Like I said in the video, one day I may chill on Alchemy and forgive it. But if that day comes it will not be for a while yet. This whole video was basically me venting
@WizWiteKnight yeah me too, the sickness, history with card games, the transgener, arena's economy being the worst I've seen, and even more so about hex shards of fate, sad i can never go back to that game. no feelings on alchemy because play timeless and draft
Oh yeah, I'm not saying it would be fun, just possible. My point is more about how much time gets put into creating cards not everyone will play. A reason they've specifically cited as to why we can't have the 3 block structure any more (because it wouldn't be for everyone). But then they also go and printed overly priced sets and pre-cons and say "Not every product is for every person". It seems this only ever works one way though, and I'm sick of it. Mini rant over haha, you may have just inspired another video from me
Seek could be: Shuffle your library, then turn over the top card until you turn over a card that matches the criteria. Put that card into your hand, then shuffle the others back into your library. Only thing different is the deck gets shuffled, while mtga seek doesn't shuffle. And while shuffling twice is a bit of a hassle in paper, it's not an unusual thing to shuffle repeatedly throughout a game.
Oh yeah, totally. And there will be people that will say shuffling at all defeats the point of the mechanic. But to those I say... well actually I don't say anything yet. I've been saving all those thoughts up for a video. BUT I certainly think about cards like Ardent Angel, Oubliette, Garth, Urza and that new Discord pony secret lair card. These cards either take existing digital rules and make them work in paper. Even if they have to change the cards functionality to do it
I am not arguing against this video as a whole at all, as I do not have any strong feelings on alchemy. However, the point you make around 7:15 is exactly the same reasonnthat Wizards is incredibly slow on ban announcements in different formats, despite banning them being healthy for the game. I disagree that this is a good model for competitive play, and think that cards should be rebalanced and banned no matter their price tag
Ahh, yes I agree. But I'm of the opinion that more time should be spent in development with play testing so that cards don't need to be banned in the first place. It's only been in recent years that bannings have become a regular thing
i disagree with hearthstonification, in hearthstone you are reimbursed for the specific card that is changed. this is controversial because usually they nerf combo pieces and archetype supporters instead of expensive cards ...but what arena is doing is even worse!
one note: You _can_ ignore alchemy changes to paper-equivalent cards if you're playing with friends. When you direct-challenge, you can choose to not play with 'rebalanced' cards, and still have alchemy cards in your deck. So you can play with the version of Orcish Bowmasters that procs on ETB alongside alchemy-only mechanics, ignoring their alchemy rebalance. (Note that if they rebalance an alchemy-only card, then you're screwed.) of note, there's a fan-format called 'gladiator' which is 100-card singleton, that uses this 'format'.
I haven't dipped my toe into Arena. Do you still get the same rewards (if such a thing exists) for direct challenge and playing with friends as you do for playing against strangers?
@@RedBobcatGamesYeah, stuff you do in direct games against friends still counts towards the daily quests. It doesnt count towards the stuff you get from winning games though. You cam only get stuff as a reward for winning games if youre playing casual standard against random people, standard brawl, ranked for any format, or an event like a draft or something.
I personally never minded alchemy, and even I kidna liked alchemy cards. Frankly, that was mostly due to fact that on areana I didn't really played very good decks, so I glagly took all the buffs azorius fortell and spirits got. Gonna be honest, claim that ALL Alchemy cards could be printet in paper, is bold AF, and when I can see it for a big portion of the cards, I'm really interested what your proposition for perpetuality and -discover- draft would be.
Perpetual is the easiest one, but I also hate the solution. Which, in fairness I never said these would be good to play in paper. Just that I think it's possible
@@RedBobcatGames That's why I'm saying it's bold. Being possible only means they could print it in silver border set. For black borders it would need bit more than that.
@tratanlightbreaker6029 Oh, but have you not seen that things like Stickers are already black border? Silver border didn't sell, so had to be removed from the game
as someone who likes having fun making custom cards, one day i'll learn the best way to make good proxies (but also have a reason to make proxies since i'm not in the usa so i can't partecipate to those multiple events where people take different tables in the same giant room to play many games and in many different formats) and one reason to make proxies is because i have in my sight a five color lukamina commander deck
I always felt the main reason to make proxies is because you want to and you enjoy it. Everything else sort of doesn't matter. Good luck to you, I hope you find whatever reason you're looking for to make those proxies. Have you thought about starting a social club or something? If there are other people near you, I'm sure some of them would want to play
@@RedBobcatGamesthank you for your consideration :3 there are for sure some people playing mtg around my (big and public-transportation-poor) area, but unfortunately i'm not that kind of person that is extrovert, not shy and that do things like organizing a club in a library
My Favorite Alchemy Card is a White Stax Piece from Thunder junction called Stalwart Realmwarden. 1WW 2/2 human soldier. First Strike/ Lifelink When He Enters your Opponent gets an Emblem with “the next noncreature spell you cast costs 2 more to cast”. People talk about Thalia being good. And she seems Unplayable to me... Blink this Bad boy a few times and you can basically Tell your opponent we are playing Timmy cards only and completely lock them out with an assymetric stax effect once you put 4 or more emblems onto your opponent. Cyclonic Rift? That’ll cost 15 mana. Go for the Throat? Hmm best I can do is 8 mana. 🫤 Most players won’t be eager to spend 3 mana casting Cut Down the turn he comes out. And by then it’s already too late.
There is a lot of concepts used for alchemy that could have been published in paper or adjusted for it... and it hurts me for some I have looking for new cards for my commander decks and saw something nice (like this blue / green bear) only to realize I couldn't put it in. That is my main problem with it and i'm 100 % you about it. Also, it was revealed that some cards of physical sets are changed to fit arena play so the developpers get to alter the play pattern of physical players.
I talked about that exact thing in my most recent video. There's a whole section on it toward the end because the developers talked about changing cards from MH3 to work on Arena
(Hex) I played a lot of Heartstone and although it is fun to not have the limitations of paper, I slowly started hating their abuse of nerfs. It is incredbly frustrating to have your favourite card all of a sudden become unplayable without the option to play the old version in 4fun formats. When I first learned about Magic Arena and Alchemy cards, it was like an old trauma resurfacing.
Honestly, as part of your point, demons as a faction basically don’t exist in midnight hunt and crimson vow, like there’s a couple demon and devil cards. But they’re just missing from the important stuff.
Yeah, which is a shame because Demons especially are so of the most interesting part of Innistrad's lore. (Plus Devils have always been better than Goblins, but I suspect that's a different video)
Yeah, I suspect this was a joke. I do like the idea of proxying an Alchemy card and then playing exactly as written without changing the rules at all though. Seeing my opponents face as I just look at every card in the deck to "seek" something would make me laugh
@@RedBobcatGames@RedBobcatGames Nah, bro, my friend has like half a dozen alchemy cards in his hand-size matters cube that uses conjure as a way to control hand size.
Strong agree on all your points. For me the character I couldn't get was (Bo Levar) as Crucias from Brothers War. His story back in "The Colors of Magic" was one of the things that really sold me on Magic. At least we got Guff in Commander Masters... god I wish wizards would right their ship again. Also Hot Take: WotC would be best served by only making MtG video games that DON'T try to be a copy of the card game directly. Give me a L4D/Vermintide clone set on Innistrad, a Roguelike about exploring Ixalan or the Skyclaves on Zendikar, or a 4x game where you play as one of the big bads trying to take over the multiverse or something.
OH MY GOD I NEARLY STOOD UP FROM MY CHAIR WHEN I READ THAT! Odric, Rem, Thalia and Grete clearing out Zombies and Vampires around Thraben SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
@@RedBobcatGames Heck I'd be fine with new characters if they're worried about messing with existing characters lore... I'd even just be happy with them being NPCs as the mission control or something.
@ZombieJeff Create my own Innistrad characters? Stop toying with my heart! Dear lord I would play this to death. Did you ever play that old xbox 360 game, Hunter the Reckoning? I'd want it to play a bit like that I think, but a Vermintide type game would also rock
Garth One-Eye proofs you can do conjure in the normal game so it can definitely be done and perpetually is similar to stickers with counters that stay in the grave and field.
@MrJerichoPumpkin WotC themselves are willing to change the rules to make a card work in paper. Again for example Oubliette and Ardent Angel. It's not a massive leap to get from Garth to some Alchemy mechanics
"Every alchemy card COULD be printed in the real world, they just wouldn't be as fun"... bro how on earth could you have the opponent discard their card with the highest mana ability without showing their hand? Or how can you give every creature card in your library +1/+1 in your library perpetually? That isn't playable in paper. What a stupid point. And if you could rework a card or rule, but it isn't fun, what is the point?!!!! The whole point about alchemy is having mechanics that wouldn't be fun in the real world because they would be too slow, or would need a 3rd party to verify if something is true, but would be very fun online. Also, how would you shuffle the power 9 into your deck 8 times? You are telling me, that you expect wizards to print a card that in order to play it, you would need to carry around an additional 72 cards?! You really haven't thought this through. Your only kind of decent point is the refunds for changed cards, it would be great if they supported that. But at the same time, they have the timeless format, which solves this. Bowmasters isn't changed in timeless, and I love playing that card in timeless. It was cool how it dominated historic and alchemy, then they nerfed it, but I could still play it. It was too dominant in alchemy, but I'm still glad they could adapt the format in post, and still find a way to have the original card playable. You also included gripes about arena in general, which have nothing to do with alchemy. Yes, you cannot make your own formats up. While that would be nice, it won't happen until magic released an nft version of the cards. But you could say the same gripe about literally any digital card game. Its just a current limitation of the format of the technology. And your gripe is you cannot get your favorite character? That isn't an alchemy problem, that is just a wizards problem. There was nothing about the alchemy format that prevents them form making a paper Davrial. All the points you made were objectively pretty weak. You can keep your own opinions sure, but you have to acknowledge that your points aren't that strong. It sucks that hating on alchemy gets so many views. The worst part is you don't even play the format, so how can you even say it is bad. You literally do not know how much fun it is. I think publishing a piece like this is peak stupidity, and dishonest. You are just publishing it to get more followers. I'll take you more seriously when you've played the format for a year then have given an opinion.
Well that's the video I said I was working on. If I answered here then I'd have no need to finish the upload. So I guess, if you really want me to go over your points you'll just have to wait till the video is up. Some day
I hate it when I want to build a tribal deck for an obscure deck, and find some cool cards that are Alchemy exclusive. I mean come on, Shorecomber Crab is a crab wearing a pirate skull. There's also Blooming Cactusfolk, Davriel Soul Broker, Freyalise Skyshroud Partisan, Oglor Devoted Assistant, Third Little Pig, Vladimir and Godfrey, All the Arena-exclusive Baldur's Gate characters.
Incidentally, there is at least one card that has the Perpetual effect but not the keyword for it in the paper game, Riding the Dilu Horse. It's +2/+2 and Horsemanship to a creature, and since it doesn't have an "Until End of Turn" stipulation, it's a pump spell you can recur and that stays in perpetuity. Would it suck to track multiple? Probably, but I'm sure they could make a reminder card or something.
my main distaste for Alchemy cards is how pushed a lot of the original designs are. 3 mana 3/4 alliance tutor a (random) land onto the battlefield tapped? 4 mana 3/3 etb make a mana rock and whenever you cast a noncreature spell you drain your opponents and progress turning your mana rocks into timetwisters? 3 mana 3/4 that whenever you seek(ugh) a card you also make a 3/3 vigilance? Sure, powercreep in paper also exists like Ragavan, or free spells, but it just feels like every single alchemy card is at that level sometimes.
That's interesting. I wonder if they use Alchemy as a space to test the limits of design, and if it goes poorly they have a built in reason to pull the power level back down again with changes
As soon as you brought up Innistrad, I knew where it was going... And Alchemy cards aren't that complicated to do in paper. I remember Crystaline Giant or whatever it was from Ikoria... Roll for random ability counter it doesn't already have and keep track of ALL of them while also mutating on it... And we did, knowing it was really designed for Arena. We did it anyway because it's part of the game. My friends groaned when I flipped the Enigma Jewel for the first time. "How are we supposed to keep track of all those abilities?!" So I took the pile of stuff I crafted it with... and put them neatly next to the card, tapping them as I used the abilities from each, and there was no issues. I knew what everything did and could explain it, so it was just like any other new card... People are smarter than WotC give them credit, and I really wish we could just focus on making sets good rather than trying to imitate something Magic has never been...
Alchemy sucks. It's the least played format on mtga. It's cluttering up the game with cards that almost nobody wants. It's maybe okay in theory, but in practice almost all of the alchemy cards are overly complicated, confusing and not fun to play. Many of the cards frequently create very unfun situations, like board stalls or locking you out of playing your cards. It seems like very little thought was put into whether they were actually fun to play with. I feel like if they took a minimalist approach and just buffed a few of the underpowered cards, and left it at that, then alchemy would be looked at a lot more fondly.
This is definitely an improvement over the way it's handled on arena. But it's still problematic imo. One of the main reasons I stopped playing hearthstone was because I kept having favorite cards pulled out from under me and become useless. Especially as it impacted wild. There were so many cards that were strong, but basically fair, and enabled interesting strategies in wild. But because they were too good for standard they got nerfed into the ground, which made them useless in wild as well. Granted, Arena handles this differently since rebalanced cards still work the way they did originally in non alchemy formats. But that opens a whole different can of worms when you have the same card, with the same name, working completely different in different formats.
I'm still not a fan of the concept of a corporation just changing something I've purchased whenever they feel like it. BUT if it has to be that way, it sounds like Hearthstone have a better approach.
@@RedBobcatGames The balancing for Hearthstone is much tighter than Magic. Magic has gotten better about turn 1 combos, but in Hearthstone you aren't winning before turn 4, even with aggro.
@thermophile1695 So basically one of the things I'm always pushing Magic to do then. I'm sick of cards being banned, sometimes before they're even out, because they haven't spent enough time being play tested
One up on the already mentioned, but it's also entirely reasonable not only to print out paper proxies of these cards, but to actually have good quality cards professionally printed of them (albeit with a nonstandard back, due to trademark limitations, but sleeves make that irrelevant anyway :3), and at a very reasonable price. There are several extremely limited printing or non-physical products from the past that, thanks to professional printing, I am able to access in physical form for my playgroup. Vanguard anyone? :)
Yeah, I'm on board with the proxie train. I just don't want one in my binder. There's loads of empty slots in there for cards I don't own, but if they go in I want them to be the real thing. If they were just to play with then I'd have no issue, but I want to own that Davrial card, a real one
Teyo... My sweet baby boy... At least the Guff precon gave me a new Teyo but there is still a version of my favorite character I will never own and, according to Mark Rosewater, we're probably never going to Gobakhan.
I just wish they did more march of machine epilogue esque sets, so that they can focus on the current story and stuff going on without having to shove fan fave chars. This way you could go back to innistrad, and have some werewolfs, have some angels or something even if its not story relavent. Honestly I was just a huge fan of epilogue once it sorta lessened its price on the secondary market. Like a 60$ booster box with a smaller print run sounds epic.
I was against what you were saying until you got to price. Maybe that's the key? Return to three block sturcture, but make the 2nd set a little mini expansion. Just to advance the story a touch and add in a few new cards. Then finish it off proper with a final act?
My biggest complaint is cards like Tiana, Angelic Mechanic that feature fan favorite characters who can't be played in paper without taking to my opponents
My feelings on Alchemy cards can be summed up by the following cycle: 1. I find a cool card for a deck 2. I realise it's Alchemy 3. I'm disappointed. 4. Repeat I dont think I've ever used an Alchemy card since they were added, and it's only served as something for me to forget.
@RedBobcatGames I feel like it's their first step to finding a way to indirectly incorporate things like that into future paper sets. I agree too, and hadn't thought about it that way until you mentioned it. Based!
@@astrowerm Ha, thank you. Tomorrow I start on a new script, and as of right now I'm thinking it's going to be a "Here's how I'd make these Alchemy mechanics work in paper". But, tomorrow's a long way off yet so I may change my mind between then and now
The only point I really disagree with is that I don’t think the team designing cards for alchemy does anything on the paper sets. At most they’d be communicating with the main set team so they can add those cards to arena but they’re definitely not the team designing them in the first place.
Oh yeah, for sure. I'm just saying two things there, one that they could be main set if Alchemy didn't exist, and two main set REALLY seems like it needs extra people working on it lately
A bunch of the Baldur's Gate legendary alchemy characters are completely different from their paper versions. Each have 5 transformations with different artwork. Bringing that to paper would be a total pain.
Oh yeah, I'm not saying it would be easy. But it is possible. Which is why one of the sections of the video goes over why I'd even want that in the first place if it's going to be hard
That's actually a really fair point I didn't consider. I imagine if I ever did try to get into Arena, it wouldn't be long before I wanted MY cards and not to have to recollect them
heyo, resident arena grinder, seems like a lot of folks have a wide variety of takes on this, so i'm here to offer my 2 cents: (pologies if this thread overlaps with some comments already made, been writing this for a bit) (check the comments, this is a multi thread post) so by no means are you wrong about the core problem with alchemy as a format, you along with most other folks, arena players and non arena players alike can parse the fairly poor value proposition that the format offers (eg. cards you get being nerfable at any time, lack of refund, ect...), the thing is WOTC (hopefully anyways) knows this too. so yes, that is always the outlook of the format, but since the outset wizards has tried, and failed to get alchemy to work in some way in arena. these attempts have largely been very mid, and the reason alchemy still trudges on these days without getting straight phased out is primarily a consquence of these two facts: -Arena needs an over the summer set to base for all of it's reward systems (battle pass [we have one yes, kinda sucks], weekly events, new set draft schedules, ect...), but since after 2020, we've largely replaced Core Sets with UB / MH / Commander focused sets. -Arena is currently a spot where WOTC tries to invest *hard* on new player agregation, (as the same as they invested in Duels of the Planeswalkers for you all those years ago). UB is ALSO a spot where WOTC wants to integrate new players. WOTC wants to have it's cake, and eat it too, despite the fact that UB isn't traditionally integrated into standard. Enter Alchemy. Alchemy is now the place where new players can start off in a 60 card "standard" enviroment, playing whatever jank they want in low tier queue for a bit with their UB... but, sooner or later *then* have to buy into paying for alchemy boosters, while also getting regular standard boosters, to get anywhere meaningful. the fact that they still try to sudo - confuse players into playing alchemy annoys me greatly from a new player perspective. This is a MAJOR problem that needs to be re evaluated in the long term. Because when they decide to incorpartate the next big UB property into arena, say Marvel, I don't really think the current new player aggregation method of introducing players to a format that they're not gonna really want to play for more than a month or two at most, while holding Spiderman hostage is gonna really boad well. To be fair, idk, whales exist, hopefully anyways most new players are choosing to stick with magic / arena standard because they're either picking up that the comunity doesn't like alchemy, or they're coming to that conclusion on their own while playing arena. One note I might leave this on for the new player issue, since I do have one take on this, that I think quite a few people like me share. I think a big thing that not a lot of people realize about arena and brawl, arena version of commander ( start at 25 life, 1v1, basically commander lite ), is that while arena's built in wildcard system absolutely sucks for getting 4 ofs for relevant standard / pioneer / historic decks, it's uniquely not the worst system when you're only focusing on casually playing with Brawl decks. For refrence, i started out in arena few years ago, and quickly realized that it was practically pointless for me to save all my wildcards for the "regular" formats, so I crafted up all the cool rares that I could find that would pair with a Sythis commander deck, and ever since I've been able to coast getting the wildcards I want for new brawl decks and playing with the current brawl decks I have to keep on getting rewards. I think the Arena team may have kind of confirmed, they're looking into creating some kind of commander-esque 4 player experience, with an alchemy release no less: scryfall.com/card/ymkm/25/juggle-the-performance if they could somehow combine a hit 4 player magic experience on Arena as a way to get new folks into the game, I'd beyond glad to see them try to integrate the prexisiting brawl commuinty tighter with the new folks. Let me be clear though, I do like the design space and potential of digital only cards, especially from where and when I've used them in brawl over the last couple years! But I hate how wizards wants them to exist right NOW. It gives the cool expermientation that's done with digital only a bad rap.
1.) "alchemy exclusive cards could have been printed in paper" _____________________________________________________________________ you mentioned you'd be making a video on how to translate alchemy mechanics into paper, and techically, from the examples you've shown, a fair number can be "translated" to paper and personally my take on it is, overall, adapability really is a wild gradient between: "why did this need to be digital?"
"if we did this in paper we'd need more dice / counters than 40k players" On this, I'll try to explain my experience with digital only cards to explain where translatability is fine, to where it fails to be practical. (one or more of my examples may have been taken by other commenters, so bear with me if i repeat some stuff) {VERY TRANSLATABLE:} - starting off, some are incredibly easy to implement, take the "who started first mechanic": (scryfall.com/card/ymid/63/forsaken-crossroads) ( scryfall.com/card/ywoe/29/captivating-crossroads ) - while gemstone caverns (scryfall.com/card/tsr/280/gemstone-caverns) is the only bearer of a "who started first mechanic", and it -enables turn 0 thoracle combo- largely integrated into regular magic! - mind you, I can make a fruitful guess why they probably aren't reprinting these two, spesfiically, a big one probably having to do with these being instant staples in commander in the same vain that arcane signet is kind of an instant staple mana rock in any commander deck, so good from a diversity stand point -by the same merit though i could see this just as well being a mana base reprint equity issue, similar to fabled passage (scryfall.com/card/eld/244/fabled-passage), if the card did get a printing, it wouldn't see a significant reprint for a while, so both sides here. anywho... {SORTA TRANSLATABLE:} getting past this however, digital only starts to become a bit more hazy on what exactly you'd exactly be translating to paper, as sometimes the act of putting a digital mechanic into paper constraints fundimentally diminishes what it was trying to accomplish in the first place a good example for this is a mechanic you mentioned in a video "seek", let me elaborate a bit: "seek" [CARDTYPE] is a keyword that grabs a random card that matches the specified quality from your deck. so seeking an elf gives you a random elf card, seeking a nonland card gives you an nonland card from your deck and so on... definitionally seek exists to brodly give more cards the ability to tutor, at the cost of being able only "kinda" find what you need, not *exactly*, which I think in practice is a good design, especially since other TCGs *do* let you tutor much more often, with similar constraints (see pokemon tcg: pkmncards.com/card/quick-ball-fusion-strike-fst-237/ ) (remember, when it comes to restricting tutoring, we're often the exception in tcgs, not the rule!) so, for paper while this is "translatable", it looses it's essence at a fair number of levels. -for kitchen table, while it'd be a bit janky, you could probably get away with addapting it into looking at the top card of your library until you find a card that matches the seek, and then shuffling the rest back in, kind of overpowered "commune with the gods" type effect: (scryfall.com/card/ema/162/commune-with-the-gods), but eh -but for the organized play level, seeking just breaks down entirely, because it breaks a hidden rule embeded into all tutors in magic, being that all tutors must "reveal" or otherwise make public, the things they search for. You won't ever find a tutor that doesn't do this in some form! (scryfall.com/search?q=o%3A%22search+your%22&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name). This exists at the competitve level becuase otherwise players could just cheat, tutor for whatever they want But to me at least, trying to fit seek into paper, doesn't respect seek's unique, digital design space, since in paper it won't ever be able to: -keep the card you tutored secret so you aren't directly telegraphing your current or next turn (impossible because of tutor reveal issue) -(public information can be more valuble than you'd think modern has an entire deck which relies on abusing this fact: articles.starcitygames.com/magic-the-gathering/premium/lantern-control-is- ready-to-terrorize-modern-once-again/) -preserve the order of your library, so mechanics like scry can still function (impossible becuase of tutoring necessitating shuffle) {UNTRANSLATABLE:} So, onto the nail in the coffin here for pure paper adaptation "perpetual" -as some other comments have already pointed out, perpetual was implemented as "stickers" in unfinity, and yeah, i don't think anyone's really wanting to bring this back into ( if anything, I honestly wouldn't be suprised if stickers recive wholesale functional eratta ala companion in the next 5 years or so, as they really do have some pretty glaring design issues ) (taste of the madness while reviewing some unifinity nonsense when writing this: www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/y06bij/the_hitchikers_guide_to_stickers_in_commander/) -I'll be honest, if unfinity is anything to go by, I don't really think perpetual style effects is something that paper magic should try to directly emulate, out of the pure headache that it would (and has) caused for paper. -the thing is, perpetual in digital only has really run the mile where paper has, enabling a whole suite of intresting designs that work because they aren't nearly as confusing in a digital context, counter to unfinity's implementations in paper -(scryfall.com/search?q=o%3A%22perpetual%22&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name) -I won't argue that all of them are bangers, since especially at the start the cards where fairly underwelming since they where still testing the waters, but -the only two exceptions i'd probabably point out, if you are looking to emulate some of the design space are Skullbriar, and their recent cousin, Me,(the immortal) (scryfall.com/card/2x2/277/skullbriar-the-walking-grave, scryfall.com/card/who/147/me-the-immortal) -I like this design space, since the "everlastingness" conforms to pre-existing limits, that are easily incorparatable understandable, eg. counters So overall, I get the desire to try to translate stuff into paper, but especially in the respect of folks playing a cohesive / non mentally taxing game in actual paper for me at least the question stands: "Sure, you *COULD* implement digital mechanics -but if it takes a "Goblin Game" level of time do -or takes a "Chains of Mephestophalies" level of rules understanding understand how to play correctly -or is generally (annoying / uneventfully boring) to keep track of like daybound ... why are we doing this? Ultimently, if your opponent(s) (don't understand / don't enjoy) what they have to play against, is it really that great? Why do we want to put this into paper? (goblin game: scryfall.com/card/pls/61/goblin-game, chains of mephisotpehles: scryfall.com/card/leg/91/chains-of-mephistopheles , daybound: scryfall.com/card/mid/174/burly-breaker-dire-strain-demolisher) Mark Rosewater when asked on his blog has made a good analogy for this before (can't find the quote verbatim, pologies), but he harkens that: digital only cards try new things that can (and probably should) only be done digitally (eg: spawing in new entirely cards to the game, perpetually ), < in the same way that...> un-sets try things that only make sense for face to face tabletop magic (eg. having a player outside the game decide something, having cards that care about watermarks / art, ect...)
2.) "magic's slide to becoming more like hearthstone" _____________________________________________________________________ *btw, this rant is on the mechanics side, didn't realize that your full argument was more economy focused, but this still is very relevant to some of what I speak on above so i keep this regardless.* {THE PROS} I'll say up front, at a fundemental level, digital is still very helpful for me because even outside of MTG, for most tabletop games, I like digital addaptions for games which rely on mechanics where you have lots of: mental accounting / game piece manipulation / cards to keep in order on the board, since I personally struggle keeping up with these in a regular tabletop game. Put another way, if I can rely on Arena to help me with the busy work of: -auto tapping with a really big manabse -auto filling the 19 in my draft deck -helping me not miss my triggers / reminding me of important things, (like if something has ward) -auto running a complicated interaction, without me having to search for it for +3 min. ... it helps me enjoy Magic, quite a bit more. {THE CONS} but to acknowlage the cons that that Arena causes here's the ick and thin of what I've discovered, after becoming an enfrancised paper player for 2/3 yrs. first: the "hearthstone-ification" of magic has been a long standing issue long before alchemy put a face to a name for example, cards like Abrade ( scryfall.com/card/hou/83/abrade ), and similar multichoice style cards exist to remedy the fact a lot of digital folks tend to only play Best of 1 on arena, thus needing a card with a "sideboard-esque" mechanic built in. ( learned this fact from chorocojo: www.youtube.com/@Chorocojo/ underated mtg youtuber please sub!) the core fact is that digital only / digital mostly (in my case) players exist, and by extension will nescessitate certain design aspects from MTG that might be counter to what tabletop, or even organized play needs.( while this video talks about many more issues than digital this video from AmmiO2 explains plenty of these digital problems fairly well: ruclips.net/video/tqEb3D5bjVA/видео.html) second: from a design perspective, that R & D nowadays often pulls a "eh, we have digital, tabletop can put up with it" approch to designing set mechanics, see: - daybound/night bound (scryfall.com/card/mid/169/bird-admirer-wing-shredder), -tracking something that outside limited, and some situations in standard will have very little impact on the game, unless your deck cares about it, -(e.g. tolovolar: scryfall.com/card/mid/246/tovolar-dire-overlord-tovolar-the-midnight-scourge) - double face cards / battles (scryfall.com/card/mom/237/invasion-of-moag-bloomwielder-dryads , scryfall.com/card/mom/43/tarkir-duneshaper-burnished-dunestomper?back) -an undue amount of information being burdened on your opponent to know, just for a simple spell you're casting on curve -in digital, you can just right click the card, and learn what you need to know, but in paper, it takes a solid 30 sec. to unsleeve reveal, read and put back. -heavens forbid you forget what the battle does and you need to ask again -mom was my first "in paper prerelease", and this was a significant draw back to an otherwise cool set - mainline set tokens which aren't immediatley clear what they do: (scryfall.com/search?q=set%3Atwoe+t%3Aaura&unique=cards&as=grid&order=set , scryfall.com/card/tlci/17/map ) -roles in my opinion really needed some more TLC for their implemenetaiton in paper, never ever in paper does a role relevant card explain what the token is: -(scryfall.com/search?q=o%3Arole&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name) -instead you're left to decipher what a "wicked" role is, and again, right click on arena explains this in >5sec. but in paper, it just makes things all the more cumbersome - by extension for that last one... dungeons () -no... just... seriously i have no clue how the same game which has had (6+) returns to a plane about D&D style adventuring could manage to fumble the ball so hard on this when tasked with creating an orignial mechanic to pay homage to the source material So to tie back to my theis in point 1, let me ask when you say "alchemy cards could have been printed in paper": By the examples I mention above, we've already been seeding in digital-like mechanics. The diffrence is these cards don't always scream "I'm digital!" So, by nature digital only cards, incorparate this level of extra, often hard to track detail, by design. Which would you prefer then? - generally maintain for paper simplicity whenever possible? - or try to fit in even more digitally based mechanics, with verying degrees of intutiveness in paper? and, I don't to provide a false dichotomy, we very much can try to opimize for both, but the fact stands that digital only can at the very least give these mechanics room to breathe without causing an issue.
3.) "non physical cards are non collectable cards" _____________________________________________________________________ -to be fair, I don't have the same pension as you when it comes to wanting to own cards " in the cardstock " as it where, but this is a genuine perspective I haven't considered until now. I do get where you're coming from too, a similar issue that this mirrors to me is the standard commander decks every now and then, take the pivotal "story cards", like characters or events that should have been in the main set. -thankfully as of yet, they haven't been dumb enough to try to throw story crucial cards into alchemy, but in the last year they have gotten annoyingly complacent with throwing fan favorite side characters into alchemy only with murders at markov manor promenently gating three rather popular characters to alchemy only: ( scryfall.com/search?q=set%3Aymkm+t%3Alegendary&unique=cards&as=grid&order=set ) -mind you i'm mixed on this, because there are unique design aspects of these new alchemy renditions that I find intresting, even for your Gutmorn example, (scryfall.com/card/ymid/28/gutmorn-pactbound-servant) this is an intresting card that does have a cool play design, this card would totally go into one of my brawl deck, if not be a commander for one. ) -but no, i recognise, that for players who (rightfully!) don't want to put up with the hell that arena can be, doing this really does garner nothing but well deserved ire from folks who don't play Arena, your point still stands, and I really wish Arena would avoid doing this.
4.) "time being used for alchemy isn't used for main sets" _____________________________________________________________________ - I think this was addressed by some other folks commenting, but arena team is, from what I hear anyways, not directly tied to R & D proper. Overall, that end bit at the video where you talk about issues with Karlov Manor really just seem more like, big picture, Hasbro layoffs, than alchemy interupting that directly. I ain't WOTC, so who's to say. and again with all of the ranting over what I do like about the design space of digital, I don't think time is being "wasted", rather, the time that's being used for digital only isn't being translated into a way that players can effectively enjoy these mechanics.
I personally enjoy alchemy as a draft format. It works super well in limited and is a ton of fun to play with on arena specifically due to how quickly arena can resolve a lot of the interactions and effects that would otherwise take a ton of time to do in paper. What I don’t like is cards being changed outside of draft, and being required to play in formats with them legal and with alchemy changes if I want to play eternal formats. I personally do enjoy playing constructed alchemy too since I can reuse the cards that I picked in draft, but with the shorter set rotation it is quite disappointing. And as for the reason why you hate alchemy, I think it’s absolutely awful that they’d not have the characters also printed, they should only have characters in the alchemy sets that they already printed nonalchemy versions of in the main sets. They used to do that with planeswalker decks and there was nothing wrong with it. Also I hardly play paper magic anymore due to the cost. I can play arena for free by being good enough at draft, but with paper magic the amount I have to pay for a deck is just too prohibitive to afford anymore.
Yeah make a lot of good points, and it's always wild to me hearing from people that play how Alchemy isn't sectioned off into it's own format. It must be mad to have to keep on top of these digital only cards that can change whenever in formats meant to replicate paper. Weird. And as for the cost, that's getting crazier each year. I feel like Play Boosters were just an excuse to raise the price of draft. Bad times
@@RedBobcatGames Exactly. I’ve been really wanting to play paper magic again for a long time, but I’m the kind of person who enjoys designing my decks and seeing how they do against other people’s decks, and especially with the price of cards and my preferred formats being standard (and probably pioneer) needing new cards constantly I just can’t afford to have fun in paper like I used to.
As someone who plays loves and started the game on innistrahd loved that story and now i also hate Alchemy more now. They even snubbed destroying some cycle cards I like phyrexian annihilator 4 black then we got a white angel equivalent 4 white then alchemy got the red one so no that cycle will be complete .
They've said that the Alchemy design team have no connection to the paper design team, so them printing the Phyrexian Red-inator had nothing to do with the main team not printing it. It also won't stop them from printing one in future. The Alchemy team saw there was no Red-inator in the main set, so they made their own one. That said, I'm absolutely livid. I love Emara Tandris so much and seeing a new online-only one fills me with rage. Same with Phyrexian Harvester. I have a Phyrexian Tribal deck for each Praetor and not having the red one in paper kills me.
Ah, I guess here are some more big reasons they are annoying: 1. Historic Brawl is affected by any buffs or nerfs from Alchemy. 2. Paper cards aren't safe because at any point, they might get special Alchemy counterparts that get nerfs or buffs (Cauldron Cat, Geological Appraiser, The One Ring, etc). 3. This wouldn't be a problem if we had Historic or Timeless or Historic Brawl formats without Alchemy, but we don't. I'm not saying Geological Appraiser Discover combo wasn't annoying, but it's just an example. RIP in the chat for any folks who invested wildcards into Leyline Geist before that got shot in the foot. (for my non Arena players, Leyline Geist abused a stupid Alchemy card called Fragment Reality, a 1 mana white Instant that exiled any nonland permanent and then its controller put a random creature card with lesser mana value from their library onto the battlefield tapped. The deck used 4 mana Leylines so that the Instant could target ones own Leylines to always get Geist of Saint Traft on Turn 1. Some decks ran a bunch of cheap protection and enchantments for quick kills in Azorius and some ran edicts in Orzhov for the mirror match. It got nerfed so now Fragment Reality can only target opponent's nonland permanents.)
I haven't gotten into reading the magic lore, but that is kind of because I don't want to yearn for characters I want to see but never will. Also, Spice8rack made a video about Lorwyn, and apparently Rhys in the book is nothing like how his card is. Flavor fails just feel bad.
I had the same visceral reaction when Alchemy came out. I've come around on it, though, from playing lots of Brawl. Plenty of cards are much more playable and have more interesting interactions thanks to Arena's unique cards and alchemy updates to old ones. I've also never experienced a card being made worse via Alchemy while it was ever Standard legal. I have, instead, had the experience of Oko being banned and that shifting the meta towards decks that mine had a much bigger loss rate against, as the aggro deck I played at the time went positive against Oko. Alchemy has only ever made cards and commanders more approachable in my experience with it. I do disagree on Alchemy being 100% able to transpose to paper. Things like Perpetual effects get muddled if a card is sent back to a zone like Hand or Library because there's no guarantee (outside of a singleton format) that you're not seeing a second copy. Other cards like Davriel could be made to work but would need a secondary resource similar to how the silver bordered Urza worked. I will say, though, a ton of my enjoyment hinges on my resolution to never spend a dime on Arena. After the shit they pulled with Duels, I'm only ever going to free-to-play anything they put out. Arena's lasted awhile and may actually stick around, but I can fund the decks I want more than enough by knocking out dailies and going positive on drafts. There is a bigger conversation to have here about ownership and proxies, after all. There's absolutely nothing stopping you from having high quality proxies made of the Innistrad Alchemy cards and, given 'lunchroom' Magic is the most popular format, it'd be no issue finding people who'd be okay with you running them in a deck. The only distinction between the proxied play pieces and the 'real' printed ones would be one of tournament legality and that's it. And yet there's always this weird aversion to proxies, that they aren't 'real' cards. There's some capitalistic insistence that these perfectly valid game pieces are somehow 'lesser than', and that's fascinating to me.
Thinking on it, though, they did make 'Sticker' cards from the most recent Un-Set legal in eternal formats, so there is precedence for 'marking' a card to affect it permanently. On the flip side, I can't fucking stand Sticker cards and only ever enjoyed playing them in a fully Un-Set limited environment, so there's that, too.
Ahhh, you beat me to it. I was about to bring up stickers. I do also hate them, and in fairness I never said making them work in paper would be a good idea. Just possible. You're right about bans and Oko etc. But to my brain that falls into a different conversation about FIRE design and power creep. I wish WotC weren't pressured to put out as much product as they were. What's that old saying about quantity and quality?
Exactly all that,@@RedBobcatGames I personally miss getting to sit and spend time with three set blocks and all that came with it. Of course, it did have its down sides--while I love Phyrexia, I also can't stand Poison, so when Scars block came around I just had to sit out until Innistrad dropped nearly a whole year later. I'm glad we didn't have to waste entire years+ every time they thought I cared to return to Ravnica, at least. So there's positively *ways* to make Alchemy cards playable at a table, but it does take some really awkward wrangling like stickers, third parties, and secondary resources beyond a token here and there. There is a part of me that respects they're trying to make the most of a digital play space, though I also understand feeling a bit frustrated over things that exist as digital only. It's a mixed bag, even if it does shake out as a means of playtesting how some more 'genre-breaking' kinds of mechanics are received, since a lot of it does push the envelope for what's expected in a normal game of Magic. I remember the first time I came across a 'Draft a card from XXX Spellbook' creature and thinking, "Well that's some fierce bullshit" and have since come around on it, even if I think old One-Eye still kind of sucks.
I may have to start saying "That's some fierce bullshit" because that phrase has power. I think your right about the deisgn space, but I also wonder if Alchemy is to blame with both power creep and complexity creep. The Day Night mechanic for instance feels like it would have worked better in digital. Times are a changing
@@RedBobcatGames It's a great one to say aloud because there's plenty of places to put emphasis in there. Oh, yeah, I tend to absolutely check out of even the limited scene when a set with dual sided cards rolls out. I played all of one event of March of the Machine before the combination of incubation and tons of dual-sided cards had me going, "No, yeah, I'll explore this on Arena where it's way less of a headache to actually play around."
8:00 the big splashy overpowered dlc to drive sales followed by a series of nerfs post release is a specific and awful kind of abuse video game players recieve often, and that paper expansions could never "solve" even with rotation.
Ha, I've got a card for you: --- Begin Anew (GGWW): Destroy all creatures. Creature cards in hand get +1/+1 perpetually. --- The second effect only applies to cards in hand when the effect resolves and persists even after (for example) the cards enter the battlefield go to the graveyard, then return to the battlefield. This can't be implemented in P&P without revealing your hand to the opponent (then putting +1 / +1 stickers on the cards). Full disclosure: I don't play Arena either -- but there is a totally free game (MTG Forge) that is primarily intended for solo play that implements the vast majority of MTG cards, including the alchemy cards.
I mean, if you're using stickers what's to stop you from marking the back of the card? Or just, you know put them on the front without revealing. Magic has loads of mechanics that interact with cards without revealing them. Foretell comes to mind immediately
@RedBobcatGames I hadn't thought of putting the stickers (or other quasi-permement mark) on the back. You would need to put it on the back of _all_ the cards (not just the creature cards) and the opponent would gain a slight amount of information vs the alchemy card (he/she would know how many of the cards that you had in hand at the time the spell was cast are still there), but this would only be a minor advantage. Still, it would be a pain in the neck to implement. There's a reason that stickers exist only in "un" sets.
Oh yeah, 100%. My point was never that it would be easy, just that it could be done. And, again yeah some changes would need to be made but again again, Magic do themselves (insert Ardent Angel example). I was about to start typing an explanation as to why I'd even want that if it's hard to do... but stopped myself as I'm basically just repeating everything I said in the video haha
I always thought alchemy was sus from the start. I play arena basically just to keep my skills up for FNM drafts, so alchemy has always been useless to me. Why should I play a card that I’m never gonna see in draft? But I’m also free play only on arena so I don’t have any money in it. I never thought about the concept of characters not being available in paper magic though. That is a bit heartbreaking honestly and you’re right about how the cards are more so used just to push the game and the sales than to have any salient relationship to the story. The story has also become barely comprehensible nonsense anyway.
I like to play with all my cards on Arena, so I'm stuck playing with Alchemy cards in historic. The One Ring wasn't really made any better, and I hate it.
didn't really know alchemy got "exclusive" lore characters in it for lack of a better word. but I remember people memeing the huge list of abilities davriel has. if he ever got printed as is I would be forever upset for yet another dungeon like book keeping list of things that the card itself can't explain
Xander's Wake is a fun card and there is no non-clunky way to do it on paper. Most of this isn't issues with alchemy its issues with Arena's monetization which 1) fair and 2) don't buy gems for Arena and be okay with not being in diamond rank or whatever while you're building your deck. I like re-balance as opposed to ban because I still get to play the neat thing i liked with just a toned down effect or slightly more expensive. only so many people can be working on a project at once before adding more people just causes more overhead then help. other folks can work on other things. Getting rid of Alchemy wouldn't suddenly mean more people working on non-alchemy stuff it would just mean the folks who were working on alchemy not having jobs. You can collect just as much of Innistrad as you could before alchemy Innistrad was a thing.
Hey, never said it wouldn't be clunky. Just that it's possible to do, which would keep people like me from complaining. A big argument I hear for serialized cards is that this game is for collectors but Alchemy proves that wrong. True, but my main issue is very much with Alchemy itself. You make a very good point about more cooks spoiling the broth. I hadn't considered that. Maybe those people could go work on whatever it is they've said recently that AI should be doing. And I literally can't collect them. They're digital and don't exist
I never even payed any attention to alchemy really, even though my dad likes some of the blue/green proliferate stuff from all will be one. I’d see cards sometimes that might be cool for a cube, but went back to apathy with the revelation that they belonged to alchemy. Now, it kind of bums me out that cool designs and interesting flavor are entirely inaccessible to me by virtue of wizards trying for an exclusivity I refuse to buy into
“Oh our current Standard set isn’t doing so well hot? Well let’s push out slush art and make digital only cards….because we’re smart.”-WOTC during Alchemy’s conception. And by Odin’s beard do NOT get me started on why Alchemy’s Slaanesh existence is allowed to rotate normally but not paper….
Oh yeah, I've heard about that. Didn't think to mention it though. Still, extra year of rotation is a great idea right? Everyone loves Sheoldred? Right? Can't wait for that next Oko print!
yeah I'm insanely uninterested and largely annoyed by alchemy tired of seeing online only cards that are functional copies of a paper card, but costs are wildly different
As someone who is also eaten up by the characters thing, it's just a matter of perspective. The Alchemy team prints separately from the main team, so it's not a case of "We'll put this character in the Alchemy set." It's not that a character got the shaft to appear in the digital set, it's that without the digital set that character would never have gotten a card. Thanks to Alchemy, characters that would never se eprint are getting representation, which I think is nice for the people who like that. Would you prefer characters get printed only in Alchemy or that they never get cards at all?
Why does that have to be the options? Why not shut down Alchemy, take the team that developed cards for it and put them to work on the paper set. That way everyone could get those cards and play with them any way they like. They'd still be available online too, just like all the other cards on Arena, AND paper players wouldn't have to miss out.
@@RedBobcatGames I know a lot of the mechanics could work in paper, but they'd be quite impractical, I think. I'm not one of them, but there must a be big crowd of people who really like Alchemy and the ways it is unique. I don't think it's fair for me to take their fun away just so I can get some bonus cards
True, but as it stands currently I'm yet to speak with anyone who actually likes Alchemy for the gameplay (If they see this video, I suspect they'll make themselves known in the comments soon enough). I honestly think Alchemy might just be a thing more for Hasbro investors than the players
I love alchemy, but I will say that points 3 and 4 are valid. I don't agree, but they're valid. I just don't care about collecting pieces of paper like some older mtg players do, and it does take time away from... something else, whatever that may be. I think this is worth that time away but that leads into points 1 and 2. 1. There are some cards where this is definitely true with minimal work. There's even more cards where they'd work with a niche change to their design (most perpetual changes don't matter once the creature leaves play). But there's also a lot of cards where I don't want this to work in paper. Like tracking it and policing it would take so much work. But my main takeaway here is how I think Point 2 matters from where you come from. I play a lot of video games and in competitive, 'live' or early access games, they change all the time. You talked about the outrage of how your favourite card was nerfed and all I can think was, "First time?" Every single CLEA (competitive/live/early access) game out there goes through rebalancing all the time. Sometimes it does feel like they're doing it just to 'shake things up' and make it interesting again but on the whole I, and most the playerbase, accepts it as it tends to gravitate towards balance and/or freshness. Coming from this standpoint, it's a miracle that MTG hasn't done this before. The idea that a CLEA game can be released 100% balanced is ridiculous. I love the idea that Alchemy can and does constantly shake itself apart, creating new decks, diversity, balance, and interest. Yeah sometimes your deck gets the can but more often other decks in the meta get canned and it reinvigorates the format.
For your first point, I totally agree. I wouldn't want these mechanics to exist in paper either. I'm just of the mindset that I want to play a collectible card game, and if I can't collect all the cards then I'd rather they didn't exist. In essence, if a mechanic isn't fun in paper, then it should be a mechanic in this game at all. I'm happy for digital card games to exist, but if I want to play one I would. You know? For your second point about rebalacing, I think you're also right. I just don't like it and will continue to moan when I see it happen I suspect. A losing battle, but I don't really care. Having started this channel I now know at least I'm not alone in this opinion either, and with enough of us maybe we can make the gaming industry better (though probably not)
I'm sympathetic to the points on ownership, but I've never been invested in collecting myself. Cardboard feels as ephemeral to me as digital assets, although on principle, I agree that shifting from something you can own to something you can't is ass. No, I hate Alchemy because I have played it, and it's ass. "Rebalanced cards" more like unbalanced format.
Oh that's interesting. I was really expecting the comments to be full of people telling me to get over it because the format is great to play, and that's all that matters to them. Glad to be wrong
I quit Arena when Alchemy began and later gave away my account to a YT creator I follow. It had; 15,684 cards with 2953 rares and 609 mythic rares, 21 MR, 66 R, 199 Un, and 84 C wild cards, 33 Avatars, 72 card sleeves, 8 pets, 28,150 gold, 3050 gems, 1 draft token Happy to not give any more money to Hasbro.
Alchemy did the same thing with Kiora. WoTC is having problems trying to commission new art or having problems with plagiarism, yet they are having no problems using new art for cards that don't actually exist. It's honestly rather annoying. Especially when it is just wasted on designs that could actually have been made without alchemy.
My big issue with Alchemy is that it infected other formats on Arena. If you want to play with any card older than RtR, then you HAVE to engage with Alchemy cards. If you want to play Timeless, Historic, or Historic Brawl, you can't avoid them, because even if you don't put any Alchemy cards in your deck, your opponent certainly can.
See this last point is ny big gripe with Alchemy. Infecting other formats is exactly it. I don't want to play with these "fake" cards, and I don't put them in my decks... but I have to face every other chump in Historic Brawl that does put them in, I have no choice in the matter.
I remeber having alchemy when after first seeing. Vexyr, Ich-Tekik's Heir. Finally seeing a bant Golem commander for the Splicer creates was fun until i realized there was no paper very. Worst part was thr only reason for it to be digital was its us of seek over search.
The Alchemy cards also feel really lazy sometimes. Both in the sense that a lot of these cards can absolutely work on paper (and a lot of the ones that can't can work if you fudge what "perpetually" and "seek" mean), and in the sense that they tend to ignore design choices of the main set (like Kami of Bamboo Groves being a spirit despite no spirits being enchantment creatures, and [someone? Maybe Maro?] specifically saying that enchantment creatures in NEO represented objects being inhabited by a helpful kami).
See, this is sort of what I mean when I say the mechanics could work in paper. They'd need to be fudged a bit, but WotC have done that themselves in the past when porting over digital mechanics to paper cards so I don't see why we couldn't do it too
I'm still pissed that I finally got a new Darksteel creature to play with, since darksteel is one of my favourite concepts in the game, especially since phyrexia got their hands on it. Oh wait, Darksteel Hydra is alchemy
Modifying cards in hand without revealing them doesn't really work in paper; that really is a mechanic that can't work without a ref, either the computer or a human. To make it work you'd have to create a 'totally not the hand' zone you move the card to (like a zero mana foretell), but that is still treated as part of your hand for discard, hand look, etc. effects. Which would just be a rules nightmare; 'designate a card that goes to a zone, cards cast from this zone perpetually have haste" turns into a friggin booklet to make sure that that zone still works like your hand for every little thing that cares about hand size, or looks at the hand, or, or, or. IDK about the rebalancing cards thing. In paper MTG, you don't get refunds when something is banned, either. You can't even resell them for what you paid, because the price drops when it's banned. But yeah fuck printing 'character' cards for alchemy only.
Sure, but kitchen table magic doesn't have a ban list so that doesn't matter. There's no digital client to literally prevent you from playing the cards. Also, you forgot stickers exist in game now
"I'm so mad about something I have little understanding about" 1. Some of the "reprints" you talk about are not separate alchemy cards but cards that are made by other cards. Silly and clunky, yes. but ultimately lead to some interesting gameplay. Look at Oracle of Alpha (the card that makes Ancestral Recall) - it would be too much to make the power 9 legal in various arena formats, but a 3 mana 2/3 flyer that shuffles them into your deck is pretty cool. The other reprints were to add baldur's gate and lotr cards to a smaller arena format. If that's good or bad I'm not entirely sure but when most people get mad about "alchemy cards" they arent mad about mirkwood bats - we both know this. So creating cards, not super doable in paper without an extra deck system. Seek, maybe doable but not as cleanly or quickly Perpetual, not doable without the dreaded stickers 2. Rebalancing is almost always buffs. And when it is a nerf its for the best, and you are allowed to play a true to paper format on arena if you like. Should provide some sort of refund though. 3 Do you understand how petulant this comes across? "I'm sad because I can't own physical versions of a thing from a video game" I want a real life buster sword that I can wield just like Cloud does. 3b. Yeah. Gross trend in the industry. you're somewhat informed on your subpoint 4 It's the arena devs not Studio X that make the alchemy cards. Some people might have an issue with this and that's fair. The alchemy cards arent created with the same care and by the same tallented hands as paper cards are - that could be an issue in terms of game balance or other reasons. But thats not the point you made. 5. see petulant If you're going to be upset about something, be informed. Don't just fabricate points to suit your argument. Complain and rant all you want. But have a point and do your research. Do better.
This comment felt very angry considering how much you seemed to agree with me. But fun to read and you raised some interesting points, thanks for the comment and support
Usually, my problem with alchemy is just the rebalanced cards…. Having the same card do two different things in two different formats is just confusing and ridiculous. I’m fine with the digital only cards and mechanics even if I’m not really hyped by those, they don’t bother me in the slightest while playing historic or timeless, for example
Yeah, to be fair I didn't even consider how confusing it can be to have the same cards functioning two different ways. You could sort of make that argument about all the Secret Lairs and Alt Art printings too. I may just do that in a video thinking on it, thanks for the comment and inspiriation!
@@RedBobcatGames but secret lair and promos and stuff are just different templating…. The rebalanced cards make stuff like meathook massacre do actual different things in modern and historic….
It's on my list. Currently WotC keep doing things I feel the need to rage against, and then I want to take a week off making a fun video just for me haha. It's a weird cycle, but I'm enjoying it
I like the rebalancing actually. It allowed for my silly Dungeon deck to finally win some games thanks to the buffs to Venture cards. Rebalancing fixed the problem of blue being unplayable in the CLB Limited. And nerfing cards is better than banning them. I know you dislike errata, but it's not a problem in digital game. What I dislike about Alchemy is the unnecessary text bloat. The Specialise cards that require you to know six different versions if you want to play around it. The countless spellbooks. Grizzled Huntmaster who spends eight lines of text to basically say "transmute each creature card with X name in your hand and deck into a creature card from your sideboard". But instead of that he has you search your deck and shuffle? Why? Rahilda exiles "random card" from the opponent library, but isn't the top card already random? Couldn't they at least make it a nonland? Tibalt Wicked Tormentor is just disgustingly verbose. There are some designs that are elegant and use the digital design space well: Patient Zero, Kindred Denial, Begin Anew. But for each succinct elegant card there are two that half-ass the digital potential or abuse it to fit five cards worth of text into one item.
You're right in that it's not an issue in a digital game. But, Magic is a Paper game too and I think a lot of this design for digital attitude is spilling over into the main game. Text bloat as you called it, is happening in paper too. They just removed the words "the Battlefield" from ETBS to increase complexity creep and word count. Plus, yes nerfing a card is better than banning it. But shouldn't they just play test cards more before release? If that's what Alchemy was, a play test format for cards before they got printed in Paper I'd be okay with it. But as it stands, it's warping the rest of Magic around it for the worst
A very important reason to decry Alchemy that you've overlooked is its sheer level of greed. Other than the Baldur's gate set where most of it was just redesigned from a paper set, the regular online-only sets are almost entirely populated by rares and mythics. Often Alchemy releases contain one new common and, say, two uncommons, with dozens and dozens of rare and mythic cards. Keep in mind this is the format the deckbuilder attempts to force new players to build decks in immediately by default. It's just a means to drain players of wildcards that's even worse than wizards' regular fare, because at least the normal cards can be played in non-alchemy formats should they get mangled later in digital nerfs. As it stands, alchemy is just a place for dumping annoying cards into brawl.
That's a very good point. The way Arena as a whole is treated betrays the way WotC look at it. It's not a game for the players, but a money making machine for the shareholders and CEOS
Part of the reason your positive videos don't do as well might be that you're communicating your negative topics more clearly. "Format bad" works on everybody who already knows magic. "I have some thoughts, predictions and concerns" only works on people who already know you. I'd seen your nintendo thumbnail, but I had no idea what it was about. If it had said "using pokemon cards in magic", I'd have watched it right away.
Honestly they should've used alchemy to test mechanics with the plan to print the cards once balanced into sets that get printed in paper alongside other cards with those mechanic essentially have arena players as play testers for new mechanics that are potentially risky.
And we keep seeing mechanics that can "only work in Alchemy" keep getting printed in paper anyway. That new Discord from the my little pony Secret Lair is a perfect example. I'll have to make a follow up to this video at some point
@@RedBobcatGames I'm saying it's a huge, missed opportunity they wanted to be hearthstone they ignored paper. Questionable mechanics (still feasible in paper) could have been tested and tweaked without releasing a full set of those cards for playtesting on a mass scale. Then when they feel the power level is balanced to what they desired they can release the cards made on arena to a core set, commander set, or horizon set.
If you want to be blunt yes at the fundamental level I mean it already was that way before alchemy. Given the algorithms they have in place. However it has the advantage to help prevent things like oko from happening. They can't play test every interaction and scenarios this would allow them to test mechanics they might think are too weak or too strong to find the balance for the mechanic before releasing the full scale and have more companions and would also reduce the chance of erratas in the future.
Yeah, I guess I can see that. Though my first instinct is that the players aren't play testers, your play testers should be play testers and if WotC don't have enough to prevent an Oko from happening then they should hire more people (or at the very least stop firing them)
So... I come from a different point of view, all I play is cube with my friends and Arena standard, because there aren't really any non-commander players in my area and I don't particularly like commander. That being said, I'd never even touch alchemy, I mostly feel if I wanted to play hearthstone, I'd just go play hearthstone. Alchemy's design pretty much embodies all the reasons I don't wanna play digital card games. MTG's story and flavor sadly died for me with Universes Beyond, hard to get invested for me when eternal formats are a crossover clown circus. Alchemy is just another nail in the coffin. Unless something changes I'm sticking to FtP Arena and proxying cubes.
Just saying, in Arena when you craft a card, you get both the standard version AND arena exclusive alchemy card. The alchemy version is only useable in alchemy and the standard is legal everywhere else the card is legal
@@RedBobcatGames You don’t really “buy” cards, you buy packs and accumulate wildcards of different rarities to craft playable cards with. Would honestly prefer if you could. You don’t get the refund on the alchemy exclusive card if it were to be changed, but if that card has a non-alchemy variant (example: The One Ring) that will never be changed from what its original paper version was, and would be refunded if it was banned. So you could still use the OG Ring in any format it’s legal in. Not the greatest system, I agree, but respectfully had to give some more context. I’m also new to Arena so it very well could have changed to this before I started playing.
@loch1694 I appriciate it, thank you. Shame about the Wild Card situation though. Even if I had the non-alchemy version I think I'd still feel cheated if that happened to me
A problem that is just the nail in the coffin imo is that even for the alchemy/historic players isn't that great, there was the combo for a turn 1 2/2, that created a 4/4 legendary hexproof spirit token that was just extremely unhealthy to play against, and geological appraiser was breaking havoc on historic for months until they finally nerfed both combos
See this is part of my issues as well. I touched on it a bit in the video, but I think sets need longer in development and more playtesting. We just keep seeing problems come out that need to be banned later. Why is playtesting our job? Why are we buying products that aren't functional and need to be banned?
@@RedBobcatGames Indeed, I agree with that. When you divide your design groups on to "two sets" (one for standard and other for alchemy), you end up doing both poorly due to both lacking resources, I thought that you meant only on the design/creative/flavor standpoint, not as much balance, which I emphasized but I can see now that you mentioned
@xaropevic7918 It all sort of flows together at times. There are so many issues and all of them are kind of connected by the fact that Wizards are being pushed to the brink by Hasbro that sometimes I'll start ranting about one thing and just naturally move into something else haha
As someone who played Arena causally I many played historic and brawl well guess what has Alchemy in it.. Card nerfs and fake cards are so much worse when you don't want to play with them
I am kind of odd. I LOVED playing Magic Duels. I spent far too much time playing it. Then they scrapped it and started Arena. I was in on the beta testing. It was terrible and broken at that stage. I hated playing the broken piece of junk. I hated playing it so bad that I quit. I have since heard that it is much improved. But I got involved in playing another game, and somehow never got back to downloading the public release version of Arena.
my feeling about alchemy cards is that if i wanted to be playing Hearthstone I'd be playing Hearthstone
VERY good point
You'd also probably "safe" money (=spend a less insane amount) by doing that, cause Arena in general seems so stupidly expensive to me, especially everything involving tickets and limited... it seems they just took the paper prices and tried hiding them behind some predatory currency, hell I get angrier the more I think about this...
Yeah, that whole "Buy gems to buy coin to buy the thing you want" bull always annoys me
right now, even as you read this, a team at Wizards of the Coast is trying to work out how to get into your house and delete your physical magic cards
"Hello. You've reached the Pinkertons, who may we harass for you today?"
oh no they cracked that when aftermath released
my dislike for alchemy is based on the suspicion that developers are likely holding back interesting cards from the paper set in order to drive microtransactions when they release them a month or two later digitally
Oh man. I didn't even think of it that way. As I said in the vid, I had assumed it was time away from development. Didn't occur to me Alchemy might just be cut content sold back at a premium. Gross
designers have been pretty clear that ideas are not saved to be used for alchemy cards. for example, legendary creatures from the story with alchemy cards but no physical cards would not have cards at all if not for the alchemy sets
Who exactly said that though? Cos there are those at WotC that swear up and down they don't use AI art
@@screamcollectorso if they didn’t save cards to release digitally they came up with a few new card ideas with art and play testing in a month. It’s possible but I’m not buying it.
All Alchemy exclusive cards include abilities that cannot be replicated in paper magic, or that are no longer allowed to be made in paper magic because they are too hard to track. They all either have perpetual, make a permanent change to a card in all zones, or use a mechanic that only works in digital like "seek." The only exception to this is "boon" cards, which grant a one time use trigger the next time it happens in the game no matter how long from now that may be. Boon is the only mechanic that could be replicated in paper but they won't print because it is too hard to track. Literally every card for alchemy has a digital exclusive ability according to those rules. They pad out the rest of the alchemy boosters with cards you could also pull from the base set.
The weird thing is: i play alchemy every few days but only ever until i finished the daily quests. After that there are no more rewards and it's not fun enough on its own to hook me. I can however play EDH for 6 to 8 hours every sunday without getting bored of it. Something is missing online, the social aspect of course, but there is something else. This goes for deckbuilding too, it's somehow not really satisfying in Arena.
I mentioned in my lastest video there's something about opening a bucng of cards that's very satisfying that digital just doesn't capture for me. It just feels good to hold and shuffle a physical deck
It's THG. That's what's missing. It was a blast back in DotP times. But they couldn't implement it in Arena because there is no chat function. And there is no chat function because of cross-platform compatibility. There's so much potential in Arena, like other formats, cubes, and everything, maybe even custom cards, but mobile gaming is holding it all back, forever.
@@FilmscoreMetaler just have those modes unavailable on mobile...
Same boat regarding alchemy for the most part, but one thing you might not know given not having touched arena in a while: if you want to play non-standard brawl (their commander lite mode) in order to play your favorite commander who isn’t in standard anymore, you are FORCED to play alongside people playing alchemy cards, some of which are immensely annoying and pushed.
Ps; as for ‘any mechanic in alchemy can be made on tabletop’ I would argue the ‘draft from spellbook’ mechanic unless you allowed people to bring extra sideboards of just the cards from that cards spellbook.
I mean is it much worse then the sticker deck?
@@bestaround3323 yep, very much worse
So, I guess spoilers for my thoughts on a video I haven't made yet. But my current thinking is something akin to Garth One-Eye. I'm not saying it's perfect as I haven't done the work yet. But off the top of my head I'd either do something like that, or maybe even Urza, Academy Headmaster (though I wouldn't use a website. I'd do it on a reminder / token card like the old transform ones that contain block text)
@@bestaround3323 the card that most gets my goat is a 4 mana 4/4 which basically reads ‘whenever a land enters play under your control make a copy of it” and then proceed to include a fetchland for a total of 4 mana ramp.
@benjaminehren7965 Totally fun and fair magic. Every deck should auto include a full playset. Make it the new Sol Ring lol
I don't like being "that guy" but it feels like Wizards/Hasbro are giving up on the vorthos crowd. Not that they aren't producing the plot or developing new characters or worlds but they are shoving characters like Davriel, et al, into the corners to make room for UB content and exclusive alchemy products.
I woudn't worry, I don't think it's possible to be "that guy" in the comments of this video haha. But yeah, I agree with you
And you do realize that alchemy isn't every single mode in arena?
@@AngelusNielsonit's in every format on arena that isn't standard.
@cascaozymandius9911 Yeah this was my understanding too
@@RedBobcatGamesNot strictly correct (ignoring limited) - Explorer is a 'cut down' version of Pioneer - supposedly the intention is to eventually have all pioneer cards available, but apparently this is a process that will take 'years' (for some reason... couldn't possibly be to do with trickling out high power staples keeps the money flowing... nah that couldn't be it ;) ) - so that's a second format that evades alchemy. But Historic/Timeless and Brawl all incorporate Alchemy, which sucks...
Ancestral Recall is Alchemy because there's a creature that summons a copy of each of the power nine into your deck.
Also, I really, really want Stalwart Speartail to be a real card.
Ahh, okay. I did wonder. That actually makes a bunch more sense now, thanks
Not counting the ones you mentioned, some characters I’ve lost to the evils of Alchemy are Jarsyl, Crucias, High Marshal Arguel, Teysa’s ghost version, Vona in her Anti-Pope form, Saint Elenda’s second solo card, MY BABY BOY OGLOR!
The most insulting ones are the ones with “Starting Intensity”, because the Alchemy version of Minthara flat out tells us that it’s just a slightly tweaked version of experience counters, cause the paper Minthara uses bloody experience counters.
I honestly thought I might be the only one who cared about this sort of thing when I first uploaded the video. Nice to see I'm not
Perpetual can, in certain circumstances, be very hard to keep track of in paper, and the fact that alchemy cards will just sometimes create new cards becomes impossible to deal with as soon as those cards might get shuffled into your library. Like, you would have to have a bunch of extra sleeves for your deck and a bunch of extra cards you don't mind defacing... Seek is fairly possible to do but you have to change it significantly. What seek actually does is that it chooses a random card with the property and puts in in your hand, so you would have to go through every card in your deck and separate out all the ones with the property, shuffle that pile and put one in your hand, and then you have to put all of those cards back into your library in the original order they were in before you sought and then mind wipe yourself and your opponent to forget the order of your library. I suppose this is technically possible if you just have a trustworthy neutral third party to do the seeking for you but it's very silly. I don't think that you're suggesting this, though. I assume you mean to modify the meaning of seek so that it is possible in paper, but the thing about seek that's impossible in paper is that no matter what, you would have to show the card you sought to your opponent to prove that it had the quality, so it's not actually possible.
I will tackle seek at some point, and if it takes doing something dumb then that's what it takes. I suspect I'd bend the rules to make it work a little cleaner but so far I only have a frame work rather than a full fledged rule set. The not revealing the card does present an interesting challenge I hadn't considered. I guess we'll see how I overcome it when the video comes out
Why would you need to do all that for seek. It would just work like cascade. reveal cards from the top until you reveal a card with property x, then put it in your hand and the rest on the bottom in a random order
becayse you cant use scry or surveil to set up seek but if it worked like cascade you could@@OmneAurumNon
@@OmneAurumNon thats a different ability. that interacts differently with things like scry, things that care about the top card of your deck, etc.
For my buddies and I, when we play with seek, we play "reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a card with the indicated property, then put the rest on the bottom in a random order." It's not by any means perfect but it's not very time consuming.
I hadn't ever considered that they could print fan favorite characters exclusively in alchemy. This absolutely breaks my heart 😭
It's not a "Could". It's a "Do". God I am so angry at them still lol
Entirely understandable that is such a betrayal
Yup
They have. The Gitrog Monster, Kiora, Sarkhan, Teyo, Davriel Kane, Bo Levar/Crucias, Daarigaz, Emmara, Freyalise, Garruk, Arguel, Jarsyl, Ishkanah, Niambi, Roalesk, Slimefoot, Tajic, Tiana, and Tibalt all have either appeared in paper before or have appeared in old stories of the game and have some arena incarnation.
@ulavala3798 If I remember correctly, at the time Gitrog hurt too as it had been so long since we'd seen it. And it seemed to have been messed up by the Eldrazi. I wanted to know more but... nothing. And now it's back as a mount by Thalia? Who even knows what's happening over at WotC anymore
Arbitrary "rebalancing" of items and gameplay is what ruined Path of Exile for me. I put countless hours into fine-tuning character builds that were abruptly terminated by wholesale revisions of the game by its developers. At one point, they demolished the entire concept of dual-wielding weapons, immediately disarming several of my legacy character builds. That was the final straw for me.
I know I keep banging this drum. But leave old cards alone. Don't make Hounds into Dogs, because now I have a bunch of cards that don't list the correct creature type. Infuriating. And if Companions were such an issue that the rules needed to be changed, maybe they shouldn't have gotten past the playtesting phase?
If Arena gets deleted wouldn’t the arena only cards also be deleted? Like not exist? So wouldn’t your collection be complete?
Oh my god. Yes. Yes it would. This fact is like a soothing balm on my anger. Thank you, as I imagine WotC will get bored of Arena sooner rather than later
what got me into magic was arena, it's free to download, you get things from playing, magic in itself is fun (since i never got to play irl i don't feel the diference between seeing and not seeing mt opponent in the face) and i fell in love with the story and the characters, i love biulding brawl decks (because arena doesn't have commander) around my favorite characters and alchemy cards are legal in there
in playing them, they don't make that feels bad moment just seeing them makes, seeing an obnoxious card get nerfed is kinda healthy, though maybe you don't get to be obnoxious with it, most of the rebalances are still playable, and after they leave standard (the ones that are ok in older formats) get back to how they were originally printed
this is my vision having never played magic physically, i live in a small town where there are no lgs and the most played card game in school was ygo so the playgroup of tcg players don't like magic
though i agree with your point about the cards being shoved in alchemy for hell knows what, i wish they were printed in paper as well, but on arena they don't make that bad of an impact on the game as the internet shows, at least it doesn't feel like that to me, and on the game itself, i can't feel it too,
Good points. And I'm pleased something like Arena exists so people can experience magic online if needed. Have you ever considered a webcam game? As I understand there's a few online communities that jam games over discord. Only thing I'd want to argue with is that... it's not that i disagree that nerfy cards is healthy. I guess my perspective goes back to before Fire design and I'm of the opinion that cards shouldn't be developed that need to be nerfed in the first place. I wish they'd put more thought and time into sets overall. If you don't mind me asking, have you spent any money on Arena? I've always thought that "free download" games are insidious as they're usually the worst ones for trying to get you to spend and not think about it
@@RedBobcatGames no, i have NEVER and will never spend money on arena, the biggest reasons are, if i'm gonna spend money on magic it might as well be on real cards, and the other is that arena is too expensive for me & my country, they don't regularize the cost for other regions, so a 20$ pass which is ok on a dollar basis, becomes a 100R$ thing, that's almost 10% of the minimum wage here.
also with the way drafts work on arena, if you get good enough on it, you can just go infinite, i have more than 15k gems and 10k gold stored so i do not need (nor will) spend any money any time soon
i do agree with the fire design point you make, khans and shadows over innistrad came to arena and almost none of the cards in there are really playable outside of limited, only the ones that are and have always been busted like dig through time and the fetches, but it's the only examples i have since i wasn't playing before 2020
God! I didn't know that they don't change the conversion rate for currency! That's mental! Good for you for managing to keep playing without spending though, well done. Also gutted to hear Shadows isn't playable any more... bad sign for that upcoming Innistrad Remaster
@@RedBobcatGamesyeah it's really bad how they manage other countries, but ty!
Jesus. And thank you for the info. Taught me something
My perspective as someone that primarily plays Legacy/Vintage who got into Arena to play Timeless (Gotta play all the formats built to give broken cards a home) is that Alchemy is... okay? There are very few Alchemy cards that're playable in the very competitive card pool of Timeless, where Oko isn't even good enough in a lot of games. There's a lot of them I've grown to like because they're an interesting twist on a card that I already enjoy. Kami of Bamboo Groves is an Arboreal Grazer with an interesting second mode that helps deal with blood moon/field of the dead. Bind to Secrecy is an incredibly versatile card in a Dimir control shell since it's negate at worst, but lets you do things like hold up a counterspell and steal an opponent's creature from their graveyard on endstep if you don't need to counter it.
I think Alchemy is good when they use it to do interesting things/new takes on general card archetypes that have proven playable and people like that would be inconvenient/unwieldy within the rules of paper Magic. To me, it's just them taking advantage of Arena having greater control to do things like that. Re: the balancing? I don't know. Timeless has all the "real" versions of cards so I can't comment.
There's a few I do sincerely wish were paper cards, but a few I think were them trying a bit too hard to show what "new" things they can do with the power of Alchemy. Like any Magic releases, there's going to be weak ones or cards that nobody likes. Not every card can be a hit, and with the smaller card quantity/greater attention from critics Alchemy gets, I think it's a little overhated for a few relatively minor design mistakes. Fragment Reality + Leyline was pretty silly, but I can't say it's not a bigger design mistake than something like Hogaak lol.
Yeah, all that sounds like a fair analysis of how they are mechanically. I couldn't say myself as I haven't play, am only aware of them in concept. I think it's a shame they split the player base the way they do. Again I'm reminded of the reason they gave as to why we can't have the 3 block sturtcure any more. These Alchemy cards aren't for everyone, and if that's a reason we can't have other things, why is Alchemy the exception? I have to assume it's money. Alchemy cards are more easily controlled due to their digital nature, which I supect they wanted to result in more direct sales. If I had to guess
Man, I really feel your argument that Alchemy cards are non-collectable. I have a Legendary cards collection (need only about 100 Legendary cards to finish the collection), but when I first saw these Legendary Alchemy cards I kinda got discouraged to continue this collection (I also got over it) because I saw Legendary MtG cards that I could never actually add to my collection, but they're still Legendary MtG cards. I considered proxying them briefly but as you said, why not proxy everything at that point? I really hope they'll print these "Alchemy only" cards in paper somewhere in the future
Me too. I can't ever imagine it happening but the current situation does suck
I don't think you are correct about every Alchemy card being printable and having the same effect. Seek alone is a nightmare. How can you find a random card from a subset your deck without choosing it yourself, without revealing the card, without revealing to your opponent the entire contents of your deck? You'd need a judge to perform the entire operation. And generating nontoken copies of cards from hidden zones into new hidden zones is also a nightmare. I think they did something similar to Perpetual with sticker cards, but I've never bothered to play with those, because even that sounds like a pain.
As for owning the cards in a binder as a collectors thing, does your set of Innistrad really feel incomplete without Alchemy: Innistrad cards? I think that making proxies of the remaining unobtainable cards would be perfectly valid, yeah, if all they are doing is sitting in a binder being owned.
I dislike Arena for a lot of reasons, so I play MTGO and paper instead. Honestly though, I don't have beef with any specific Alchemy cards. It's the design team getting used to "Print broken stuff and nerf later" hearthstone methodology that can bleed into paper, and oops, can't nerf those cards. Shouldn't have let the Alchemy team work in the same room with the main team!
I'm not a fan of proxies for a collection (my own that is) purely because as soon as I proxy one card the spell is broken, and I might as well proxy all of them. Which sort of defeats the point in the collection (again, for me at least)
And you're totally right about the way Alchemy cards are designed. I really feel like we're starting to see their design philosophy creep into paper. It's rough.
Oh, as for seek. In fairness, I never said it wouldn't suck to do in paper. But there are a few ways I can think of. Admittedly they involve changing the mechanic, but again WotC have done that themselves several times when converting cards from digital or older wording. It can be done again
@@RedBobcatGames I believe if you change Seek cards to tutor cards, they become entirely new cards. So if you print them that way you haven't actually printed the seek cards. That's the difficulty in that
@Kryptnyt True, but then just don't print them as tutors. They'll be more complicated, but like you say truer to how they work in digital. Just not exactly the same
Planeswalk exists. Just have seek be for a second deck you draw from and add to your hand
You know it’s crazy that 5 years before arena came out hearthstone almost perfected how a card game should be monetized. There’s one single currency and when cards are ever nerfed they give you a 100% refund of the card if you choose to. Then they also offer you a single player experience to win cards that you can use in your multiplayer experience. More people would probably play mtg arena and by extension alchemy if they had just better practices at hand.
I agree. I would personally need them to still print the cards in paper, cos I don't like being exclusively reliant on a digital client, but that's me
@@RedBobcatGames I would also agree with you since this a paper game and it physically exists. It’s sad to see only a select few cards not getting printed because “reasons”
"reasons" being money I imagine
I play Cabaretti Revels in a lot of decks on Arena and its very frustrating that doesn't exist in paper, its effect wouldn't need much tweaking to work in paper but jokes on me doesn't exist. Years later and I'm still struggling to understand who alchemy is for, drafters don't like it because some of the cards are way overpushed for draft (Emporium Thopterist is the most recent example), collectors don't like it because they can't own these cards, historic brawl players don't seem to like it as many of the most frustrating commanders like Poq, Rusko, and the Davriel in the video come from alchemy, and standard players can't use the cards so all they can do is look longingly at them in their collection.
Historic and Alchemy are both small queues people skirt around playing because they don't want to spend more wildcards filling decks with cards that can't use anywhere else. And obviously people who like the lore and just want a card of their favorite guy or more cards for their favorite faction aren't happy that these are digital only cards that aren't gonna get printed. Nobody wants these cards to keep coming out and I don't understand why they're still being released every set.
I honestly did not expect to have so many comments that share my thoughts on Alchemy. It's nice hearing from people who've had more experience with it break down exactly how they feel about it too. I think the answer to your question though is the Hasbro board room members. That's who Alchemy is for
Me and the boys on Reddit have workshopped my favorite Alchemy Commander Jessie Zane Fang Bringer to no avail.
Jessie Zane is 3/4 Human Assassin for 1GG from Thunder Junction who says “Whenever This card enters or you cast a snake spell conjure a card named Ambush Viper into the top 6 cards of your library at random. It perpetually gains when this card enters draw a card”
It’s such a fun deck. Basically it’s a snake tribal mono Green Storm deck. The Ambush Vipers have a mana value so your wincon is usually using Nykthos Shrine to Nyx, Nyx Lotus, Growing Rites of Itlimoc, or Three Tree City along with a cost reducer like Defiler of Vigor or Urza’s Incubator to go infinite then summon an overwhelming number of snakes with death touch, to draw your whole deck. With plenty of Cheap 1 mana Fight spells to punish any Opponent who dares to fuck with your board.
It’s like Jhoira Weatherlight Captain
Except with way stronger board presence, 10 times more removal options, and does not rely on paradox engine or expensive artifacts or cyclonic rifts.
I LOVE Ambush Viper. That sounds like a lot of fun
Alchemy cards are not designed by the main set team. They are designed entirely by the arena team that works independently to the main design team.
So no design efforts are spread thin for alchemy, also they don't print characters that had no room in the main set in alchemy anymore because of the blacklash.
Also Davriel is one of my favourite characters because of the alchemy card, his voicelines are amazing and the card is fun.
But, if the people who worked on the Alchemy cards didn't need to do that, they would still exist and work at the company. They wouldn't just do nothing, they'd be given another job to do. That was my point. I didn't know Davriel's card had voice lines though. That is fun. What kind of accent does he have? Does his voice sound like it fits him?
Speaking of voices, I am so curious about quintorius' voice, it would prob so funny a human voice with an elephant accent, such a bummer we didn't get it yet...yeah we prob will get bamboozled and never get his voice
.... err.
Doesn't Alchemy Murders have 2 returning legends as alchemy cards?
@suddenllybah I barely looked at the paper cards for MKM, I certainly didn't look at the Alchemy ones, so I would also be interested to learn if that's the case.
@@RedBobcatGames He has a British accent, you can search up his voicelines if you like (I tried to link them but my comment keeps vanishing)
I can see where you’re coming from but I disagree with a lot of your points. Alchemy is just one flavour of magic available on arena, it’s definitely no one’s main game mode so picking up cards just to play alchemy that then get nerfed is going to be fringe cases. There’s a lot of alchemy cards that just don’t work in paper and a big part of the fun is seeing cards that take full advantage of their digital medium to do new things. Stuff like Oracle of the alpha clone and arming gala copy are some of my favourite decks for casual online matches with my friends. As for the social aspect, arena is just one part of magic and isn’t meant to replace the tabletop experience.IRL magic will always exist. But sometimes I’m ill and I wanna play standard draft on a Friday night but don’t want to trek to my local shop. If I want the social aspects I’ll play commander but when I’m playing modern that matters less. Monatisation aspect wise, arena is actually pretty generous. You get free alchemy copies of all the cards you own, you can earn gold pretty efficiently. I play red sligh in historic and I haven’t had to spend a penny and I make it to diamond each season.
Thank you for the polite comment. It's nice to be disagreed with in such a pleasent manner.
I think you're right for most of what you said and can see it your way. Two things stuck out to me though, first about Alchemy cards not working in Paper. As I said in the video, I don't think that's the case. BUT to prove it is going to take many many many hours. Feel free not to take my word for it because I've offered no evidence yet. I believe it can be done though.
The other thing was about how Arena isn't to replace tabletop magic. No, but Alchemy is. Because you literally can't play Alchemy in person currently. If I want to play with an Innistrad Davrial Cane (which I do), I can't unless I do it via arena. The tabletop experience has been replaced.
Glad to hear about the money side of it though. Like I say, I don't play. But I raise an eyebrow at that store and it's prices.
@@RedBobcatGames I am looking forward to seeing your series on potential ways to bring alchemy mechanics to paper magic because I think that’s an interesting thought exercise. But for things like perpetual and especially conjure that add additional cards to the deck or alter properties of cards in the deck.
@aliceporter6239 It won't be clean I suspect, but like you say it's more of just a thought exercise... kind of powered by anger. I'd honestly just rather the cards didn't exist honestly. But that's not limited to Alchemy, I feel that way about of lot of recent cards designs. Oko springs to mind currently. I guess my general feeling toward the game sometimes is "I don't know what this is any more" and it's frustrating
I like all the Red Bobcat videos
Thank you
Hell yeah, Red Bobcrowd represent!
For what it’s worth: Davriel wasn’t even alchemy. It was a few months before alchemy even existed. And it was also before Innistrad midnight hunt was printed. He’s completely unrelated to alchemy the format or its cards.
And I’m definitely on the “if you want to, just print out those cards and play with them” train. Alchemy cards are still magic cards. Made by magic designers for magic the gathering. Just play the cards you want to play
That weirdly does make me less angry at alchemy. But also, it's clearly a digital only card. Are there other non-alchemy cards exclusive to Arena? That's wild
@@RedBobcatGames Davriel was in Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, in late august 2021. It featured a lot of mh1/2 cards as well as 31 digital only cards. There was a cycle of planeswalkers, of which davriel was the black card. Manor guardian (which you mentioned might be Crunchgnar), and davriel's withering were also in that set. The rest of the cards you mentioned like rahilda and gutmorn were in Alchemy innistrad.
But, he's still an Alchemy card though? Just from a different set? Was Jumpstart Historic Horizons an all Alchemy set, or have they just fully blurred the lines on Arena?
@@RedBobcatGames no he's not an alchemy card. He was printed months before the format existed. He was never legal in the format. JHH was a arena horizons set, sorta like the original jumpstart, or like any other horizons set. it had a mix of reprints and new to the format cards that bypassed standard.
@@JayIsADino I had totally assumed that all arena exclusive cards that take advantage of the digital format are arena cards. Wild that they aren't really
I enjoy Alchemy, but my card playing stopped being social about a decade ago when I got sick and a lot of my playing has been through online card games like Eternal or Hearthstone (although I never actually played Hearthstone, just has more name recognition than Infinity Wars or Mythgard).
I also stopped caring about the Lore of Magic the Gathering mostly after War of the Spark for for realisies this time after March of the Machine, so Alchemy's affect on it that you bring up have never really occured or registered to me.
Having said that, I enjoy the cards that get printed for it. One of the games I have played in the past that I really enjoyed was Hex: Shards of Fate (put so much fucking money into that dumb kickstarter, shame on me) and my favourite card in it was a pirate that cost 2U and when it came into play you got to put a creature back into opponents hand and increase the cost by 1.
Alchemy just keeps giving me that mechanic every set, I get a new card for that deck. Rusko brough back my favourite card from the Strixhaven standard period in the form of Midnight Clock and made it even better (some would say good but I say those people are weak and it was always good!) People complain about the bird that does the power 9, but i actually enjoy playing with the power 9 and its the only chance I have ever had the oppurtunity to do so.
My point is, its fun. Yeah the card nerfs are annoying, but also I appreciate that it keeps the meta fresh and stops it from getting as stale as standard has been for the last three years. I have long ago decided that active errata is better than bannings. Though the points made in that aspect are valid and I wish there was a better system, but I think ultimately that complaint is just an extension of Arena's economy is absolutely dogshit (The worst of all the games ive played, and ive played a LOT).
So yeah, I think enjoying alchemy is a hot take, but im personaly glad it exists. I think they learnt a very valuable lesson when they did the baldur's gate reprint alchemy thing where they chagned up the cards. That was also a terrible idea and youd think this massive company could shell out for new art. I think using physical art on alchemy cards is a BIG no no because recognising card art and mechanics has been something that has been learnt over 3 decades, and I do hope to see more of it in the future.
But I dont think its a bad thing that so many people dislike it because there are many valid reasons to, many of which you outlined.
Also, liked and subscribed. Good video.
Thank you! Also, I'm just as surpised as you to be honest that liking Alchemy appears to be the hot take. I honestly expected more push back from being negative about it. Especially as I don't actually play. I'm glad that people like yourself comment though. I'm glad you enjoy it and get something from it. And it's always good to hear a different perspective. If I hear it enough times my hatred for Alchemy may even subside. Maybe. Perhaps. And then I think about the empty spot in my binder where Davrial should be... nah still pretty angry actually haha
@@RedBobcatGamesI feel like proxies answer the question there. Why NOT fill that slot with a nicely printed proxy? If its just for completion sake, to fill the binder so you can flip through and enjoy it, why you letting something as dumb as "officially printed by wizards" stop you. If THEY wont print it, YOU will!
@WizWiteKnight Oh that's easy! Because I am an angry spite fuelled person empowered by the rage of looking at an empty slot haha. Like I said in the video, one day I may chill on Alchemy and forgive it. But if that day comes it will not be for a while yet. This whole video was basically me venting
@WizWiteKnight yeah me too, the sickness, history with card games, the transgener, arena's economy being the worst I've seen, and even more so about hex shards of fate, sad i can never go back to that game. no feelings on alchemy because play timeless and draft
Seek would be so damn toxic irl, sifting your deck into specific piles and then randomly selecting one card
Oh yeah, I'm not saying it would be fun, just possible. My point is more about how much time gets put into creating cards not everyone will play. A reason they've specifically cited as to why we can't have the 3 block structure any more (because it wouldn't be for everyone). But then they also go and printed overly priced sets and pre-cons and say "Not every product is for every person". It seems this only ever works one way though, and I'm sick of it. Mini rant over haha, you may have just inspired another video from me
Seek could be: Shuffle your library, then turn over the top card until you turn over a card that matches the criteria. Put that card into your hand, then shuffle the others back into your library.
Only thing different is the deck gets shuffled, while mtga seek doesn't shuffle. And while shuffling twice is a bit of a hassle in paper, it's not an unusual thing to shuffle repeatedly throughout a game.
Oh yeah, totally. And there will be people that will say shuffling at all defeats the point of the mechanic. But to those I say... well actually I don't say anything yet. I've been saving all those thoughts up for a video. BUT I certainly think about cards like Ardent Angel, Oubliette, Garth, Urza and that new Discord pony secret lair card. These cards either take existing digital rules and make them work in paper. Even if they have to change the cards functionality to do it
I am not arguing against this video as a whole at all, as I do not have any strong feelings on alchemy. However, the point you make around 7:15 is exactly the same reasonnthat Wizards is incredibly slow on ban announcements in different formats, despite banning them being healthy for the game. I disagree that this is a good model for competitive play, and think that cards should be rebalanced and banned no matter their price tag
Ahh, yes I agree. But I'm of the opinion that more time should be spent in development with play testing so that cards don't need to be banned in the first place. It's only been in recent years that bannings have become a regular thing
i disagree with hearthstonification, in hearthstone you are reimbursed for the specific card that is changed. this is controversial because usually they nerf combo pieces and archetype supporters instead of expensive cards
...but what arena is doing is even worse!
Oh... cool... I'm weirdly sorry I was wrong
one note:
You _can_ ignore alchemy changes to paper-equivalent cards if you're playing with friends.
When you direct-challenge, you can choose to not play with 'rebalanced' cards, and still have alchemy cards in your deck. So you can play with the version of Orcish Bowmasters that procs on ETB alongside alchemy-only mechanics, ignoring their alchemy rebalance.
(Note that if they rebalance an alchemy-only card, then you're screwed.)
of note, there's a fan-format called 'gladiator' which is 100-card singleton, that uses this 'format'.
I haven't dipped my toe into Arena. Do you still get the same rewards (if such a thing exists) for direct challenge and playing with friends as you do for playing against strangers?
@@RedBobcatGamesYeah, stuff you do in direct games against friends still counts towards the daily quests.
It doesnt count towards the stuff you get from winning games though. You cam only get stuff as a reward for winning games if youre playing casual standard against random people, standard brawl, ranked for any format, or an event like a draft or something.
I personally never minded alchemy, and even I kidna liked alchemy cards. Frankly, that was mostly due to fact that on areana I didn't really played very good decks, so I glagly took all the buffs azorius fortell and spirits got. Gonna be honest, claim that ALL Alchemy cards could be printet in paper, is bold AF, and when I can see it for a big portion of the cards, I'm really interested what your proposition for perpetuality and -discover- draft would be.
Perpetual is the easiest one, but I also hate the solution. Which, in fairness I never said these would be good to play in paper. Just that I think it's possible
@@RedBobcatGames That's why I'm saying it's bold. Being possible only means they could print it in silver border set. For black borders it would need bit more than that.
@tratanlightbreaker6029 Oh, but have you not seen that things like Stickers are already black border? Silver border didn't sell, so had to be removed from the game
as someone who likes having fun making custom cards, one day i'll learn the best way to make good proxies (but also have a reason to make proxies since i'm not in the usa so i can't partecipate to those multiple events where people take different tables in the same giant room to play many games and in many different formats)
and one reason to make proxies is because i have in my sight a five color lukamina commander deck
I always felt the main reason to make proxies is because you want to and you enjoy it. Everything else sort of doesn't matter. Good luck to you, I hope you find whatever reason you're looking for to make those proxies. Have you thought about starting a social club or something? If there are other people near you, I'm sure some of them would want to play
@@RedBobcatGamesthank you for your consideration :3 there are for sure some people playing mtg around my (big and public-transportation-poor) area, but unfortunately i'm not that kind of person that is extrovert, not shy and that do things like organizing a club in a library
Fair enough. Well I wish you luck all the same. As long as you're happy that's all that matters
My Favorite Alchemy Card is a White Stax Piece from Thunder junction called Stalwart Realmwarden. 1WW 2/2 human soldier.
First Strike/ Lifelink
When He Enters your Opponent gets an Emblem with “the next noncreature spell you cast costs 2 more to cast”.
People talk about Thalia being good. And she seems Unplayable to me...
Blink this Bad boy a few times and you can basically Tell your opponent we are playing Timmy cards only and completely lock them out with an assymetric stax effect once you put 4 or more emblems onto your opponent. Cyclonic Rift? That’ll cost 15 mana. Go for the Throat? Hmm best I can do is 8 mana. 🫤
Most players won’t be eager to spend 3 mana casting Cut Down the turn he comes out. And by then it’s already too late.
Power creep is making older cards like Thalia seem less good, but she'll always have a place in my heart
There is a lot of concepts used for alchemy that could have been published in paper or adjusted for it... and it hurts me for some I have looking for new cards for my commander decks and saw something nice (like this blue / green bear) only to realize I couldn't put it in. That is my main problem with it and i'm 100 % you about it. Also, it was revealed that some cards of physical sets are changed to fit arena play so the developpers get to alter the play pattern of physical players.
I talked about that exact thing in my most recent video. There's a whole section on it toward the end because the developers talked about changing cards from MH3 to work on Arena
@@RedBobcatGames i just discovered your channel a couple days ago, i am trying to catch up for now, but thought i would mention it
Thank you! And no pressure, if you do choose to go and watch my other stuff I hope you enjoy
(Hex) I played a lot of Heartstone and although it is fun to not have the limitations of paper, I slowly started hating their abuse of nerfs. It is incredbly frustrating to have your favourite card all of a sudden become unplayable without the option to play the old version in 4fun formats. When I first learned about Magic Arena and Alchemy cards, it was like an old trauma resurfacing.
From what I've read in the comments, the Alchemy cards are in every format as well. No escaping it
Honestly, as part of your point, demons as a faction basically don’t exist in midnight hunt and crimson vow, like there’s a couple demon and devil cards. But they’re just missing from the important stuff.
Yeah, which is a shame because Demons especially are so of the most interesting part of Innistrad's lore. (Plus Devils have always been better than Goblins, but I suspect that's a different video)
Bros complaing about not beeing able to play with alhecmy cards like he dont own a printer.
Ha! Yeah you got me lol
@@RedBobcatGames Wait... didn't you address that in the video...?
Yeah, I suspect this was a joke. I do like the idea of proxying an Alchemy card and then playing exactly as written without changing the rules at all though. Seeing my opponents face as I just look at every card in the deck to "seek" something would make me laugh
Oh good. I thought he had a stroke mid post.
@@RedBobcatGames@RedBobcatGames Nah, bro, my friend has like half a dozen alchemy cards in his hand-size matters cube that uses conjure as a way to control hand size.
10:01 ok, I'll proxy everything. Thank you for offering the possibility!
Yeah! Do it if you can. Proxies are great and the way to go in my opinion
Strong agree on all your points. For me the character I couldn't get was (Bo Levar) as Crucias from Brothers War. His story back in "The Colors of Magic" was one of the things that really sold me on Magic. At least we got Guff in Commander Masters... god I wish wizards would right their ship again.
Also Hot Take: WotC would be best served by only making MtG video games that DON'T try to be a copy of the card game directly. Give me a L4D/Vermintide clone set on Innistrad, a Roguelike about exploring Ixalan or the Skyclaves on Zendikar, or a 4x game where you play as one of the big bads trying to take over the multiverse or something.
OH MY GOD I NEARLY STOOD UP FROM MY CHAIR WHEN I READ THAT! Odric, Rem, Thalia and Grete clearing out Zombies and Vampires around Thraben SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
@@RedBobcatGames Heck I'd be fine with new characters if they're worried about messing with existing characters lore... I'd even just be happy with them being NPCs as the mission control or something.
@ZombieJeff Create my own Innistrad characters? Stop toying with my heart! Dear lord I would play this to death. Did you ever play that old xbox 360 game, Hunter the Reckoning? I'd want it to play a bit like that I think, but a Vermintide type game would also rock
Garth One-Eye proofs you can do conjure in the normal game so it can definitely be done and perpetually is similar to stickers with counters that stay in the grave and field.
Haha, spoilers! Have you been reading my notes? You gotta wait till I start that series I mentioned
the only thing it does is prove you don't understand how Draft and Conjure work...
@MrJerichoPumpkin WotC themselves are willing to change the rules to make a card work in paper. Again for example Oubliette and Ardent Angel. It's not a massive leap to get from Garth to some Alchemy mechanics
"Every alchemy card COULD be printed in the real world, they just wouldn't be as fun"... bro how on earth could you have the opponent discard their card with the highest mana ability without showing their hand?
Or how can you give every creature card in your library +1/+1 in your library perpetually?
That isn't playable in paper. What a stupid point.
And if you could rework a card or rule, but it isn't fun, what is the point?!!!!
The whole point about alchemy is having mechanics that wouldn't be fun in the real world because they would be too slow, or would need a 3rd party to verify if something is true, but would be very fun online.
Also, how would you shuffle the power 9 into your deck 8 times? You are telling me, that you expect wizards to print a card that in order to play it, you would need to carry around an additional 72 cards?!
You really haven't thought this through.
Your only kind of decent point is the refunds for changed cards, it would be great if they supported that. But at the same time, they have the timeless format, which solves this. Bowmasters isn't changed in timeless, and I love playing that card in timeless. It was cool how it dominated historic and alchemy, then they nerfed it, but I could still play it. It was too dominant in alchemy, but I'm still glad they could adapt the format in post, and still find a way to have the original card playable.
You also included gripes about arena in general, which have nothing to do with alchemy. Yes, you cannot make your own formats up. While that would be nice, it won't happen until magic released an nft version of the cards. But you could say the same gripe about literally any digital card game. Its just a current limitation of the format of the technology.
And your gripe is you cannot get your favorite character? That isn't an alchemy problem, that is just a wizards problem. There was nothing about the alchemy format that prevents them form making a paper Davrial.
All the points you made were objectively pretty weak. You can keep your own opinions sure, but you have to acknowledge that your points aren't that strong. It sucks that hating on alchemy gets so many views.
The worst part is you don't even play the format, so how can you even say it is bad. You literally do not know how much fun it is. I think publishing a piece like this is peak stupidity, and dishonest. You are just publishing it to get more followers.
I'll take you more seriously when you've played the format for a year then have given an opinion.
that being said, i'm glad you reply to the comments, and you will have my follow if you give a serious reply to this.
Hmmm, see I like to live dangerously. What if I don't reply seriously?
@@RedBobcatGames Then you are lame, because I bring up good points that I think should get answered. Or you'd be cool for answering, then I sub
Well that's the video I said I was working on. If I answered here then I'd have no need to finish the upload. So I guess, if you really want me to go over your points you'll just have to wait till the video is up. Some day
@@RedBobcatGames Booooooooooo! Jokes on you, I already subscribed.
I hate it when I want to build a tribal deck for an obscure deck, and find some cool cards that are Alchemy exclusive. I mean come on, Shorecomber Crab is a crab wearing a pirate skull.
There's also Blooming Cactusfolk, Davriel Soul Broker, Freyalise Skyshroud Partisan, Oglor Devoted Assistant, Third Little Pig, Vladimir and Godfrey, All the Arena-exclusive Baldur's Gate characters.
Yup. I had not seen that there was a Freyalise alchemy exclusive. I'm even more gutted now
Incidentally, there is at least one card that has the Perpetual effect but not the keyword for it in the paper game, Riding the Dilu Horse. It's +2/+2 and Horsemanship to a creature, and since it doesn't have an "Until End of Turn" stipulation, it's a pump spell you can recur and that stays in perpetuity. Would it suck to track multiple? Probably, but I'm sure they could make a reminder card or something.
I'll add that to the list of cards I'm making. Thank you for letting me know
You're not alone! Thanks for spelling it out
No worries, thanks for the comment!
my main distaste for Alchemy cards is how pushed a lot of the original designs are. 3 mana 3/4 alliance tutor a (random) land onto the battlefield tapped? 4 mana 3/3 etb make a mana rock and whenever you cast a noncreature spell you drain your opponents and progress turning your mana rocks into timetwisters? 3 mana 3/4 that whenever you seek(ugh) a card you also make a 3/3 vigilance? Sure, powercreep in paper also exists like Ragavan, or free spells, but it just feels like every single alchemy card is at that level sometimes.
That's interesting. I wonder if they use Alchemy as a space to test the limits of design, and if it goes poorly they have a built in reason to pull the power level back down again with changes
As soon as you brought up Innistrad, I knew where it was going... And Alchemy cards aren't that complicated to do in paper. I remember Crystaline Giant or whatever it was from Ikoria... Roll for random ability counter it doesn't already have and keep track of ALL of them while also mutating on it... And we did, knowing it was really designed for Arena. We did it anyway because it's part of the game. My friends groaned when I flipped the Enigma Jewel for the first time. "How are we supposed to keep track of all those abilities?!" So I took the pile of stuff I crafted it with... and put them neatly next to the card, tapping them as I used the abilities from each, and there was no issues. I knew what everything did and could explain it, so it was just like any other new card... People are smarter than WotC give them credit, and I really wish we could just focus on making sets good rather than trying to imitate something Magic has never been...
Exactly. How old is Coat of Arms anyway? Been asking a lot from the players for a long time. Why stop now? (I suspect the answer is money.)
Alchemy sucks. It's the least played format on mtga. It's cluttering up the game with cards that almost nobody wants. It's maybe okay in theory, but in practice almost all of the alchemy cards are overly complicated, confusing and not fun to play. Many of the cards frequently create very unfun situations, like board stalls or locking you out of playing your cards. It seems like very little thought was put into whether they were actually fun to play with.
I feel like if they took a minimalist approach and just buffed a few of the underpowered cards, and left it at that, then alchemy would be looked at a lot more fondly.
This is part of my point. I've looked at the cards and I honestly can't tell they're for. Apart from board room execs at Hasbro of course
Hearthstone allows you to refund any card after any change, even a buff.
This is definitely an improvement over the way it's handled on arena. But it's still problematic imo. One of the main reasons I stopped playing hearthstone was because I kept having favorite cards pulled out from under me and become useless. Especially as it impacted wild. There were so many cards that were strong, but basically fair, and enabled interesting strategies in wild. But because they were too good for standard they got nerfed into the ground, which made them useless in wild as well. Granted, Arena handles this differently since rebalanced cards still work the way they did originally in non alchemy formats. But that opens a whole different can of worms when you have the same card, with the same name, working completely different in different formats.
I'm still not a fan of the concept of a corporation just changing something I've purchased whenever they feel like it. BUT if it has to be that way, it sounds like Hearthstone have a better approach.
@@RedBobcatGames
The balancing for Hearthstone is much tighter than Magic. Magic has gotten better about turn 1 combos, but in Hearthstone you aren't winning before turn 4, even with aggro.
@thermophile1695 So basically one of the things I'm always pushing Magic to do then. I'm sick of cards being banned, sometimes before they're even out, because they haven't spent enough time being play tested
One up on the already mentioned, but it's also entirely reasonable not only to print out paper proxies of these cards, but to actually have good quality cards professionally printed of them (albeit with a nonstandard back, due to trademark limitations, but sleeves make that irrelevant anyway :3), and at a very reasonable price. There are several extremely limited printing or non-physical products from the past that, thanks to professional printing, I am able to access in physical form for my playgroup. Vanguard anyone? :)
Yeah, I'm on board with the proxie train. I just don't want one in my binder. There's loads of empty slots in there for cards I don't own, but if they go in I want them to be the real thing. If they were just to play with then I'd have no issue, but I want to own that Davrial card, a real one
Teyo... My sweet baby boy... At least the Guff precon gave me a new Teyo but there is still a version of my favorite character I will never own and, according to Mark Rosewater, we're probably never going to Gobakhan.
I feel your pain. It sucks
I just wish they did more march of machine epilogue esque sets, so that they can focus on the current story and stuff going on without having to shove fan fave chars.
This way you could go back to innistrad, and have some werewolfs, have some angels or something even if its not story relavent.
Honestly I was just a huge fan of epilogue once it sorta lessened its price on the secondary market. Like a 60$ booster box with a smaller print run sounds epic.
I was against what you were saying until you got to price. Maybe that's the key? Return to three block sturcture, but make the 2nd set a little mini expansion. Just to advance the story a touch and add in a few new cards. Then finish it off proper with a final act?
The app I used for like 13 years to find and sort MTG cards now yields alchemy cards in search results by default and i cry evry tiem
Oh that's rough. What App is it? I basically now only use Scryfall
The fact that Ghost Teysa only exists on alchemy sucks so bad. The painful part is she could be a normal card too.
Many of them could be. Well, all of them could be with work in my opinion
It's a bad egg.
Can I somehow add "Alchemy" to my tier list?
The real tragedy is that you can’t use Gutmorn in commander, his abilities would make a great commander for politicking
Oh for sure. A bunch of those cards look fun. I hope they get an Ardent Angel makeover and get physically printed
My biggest complaint is cards like Tiana, Angelic Mechanic that feature fan favorite characters who can't be played in paper without taking to my opponents
Which I see you address so instead I'll say we started with the same intro deck!
Haha! Yeah, I'm long winded but I get around to it in the end
My feelings on Alchemy cards can be summed up by the following cycle:
1. I find a cool card for a deck
2. I realise it's Alchemy
3. I'm disappointed.
4. Repeat
I dont think I've ever used an Alchemy card since they were added, and it's only served as something for me to forget.
And yet they keep making more and more
What do you think them putting alchemy cards into the mystery booster 2 boxes?
I think it's further evidence that these cards should never have been digital exclusive in the first place
@RedBobcatGames I feel like it's their first step to finding a way to indirectly incorporate things like that into future paper sets. I agree too, and hadn't thought about it that way until you mentioned it. Based!
@@astrowerm Ha, thank you. Tomorrow I start on a new script, and as of right now I'm thinking it's going to be a "Here's how I'd make these Alchemy mechanics work in paper". But, tomorrow's a long way off yet so I may change my mind between then and now
The only point I really disagree with is that I don’t think the team designing cards for alchemy does anything on the paper sets. At most they’d be communicating with the main set team so they can add those cards to arena but they’re definitely not the team designing them in the first place.
Oh yeah, for sure. I'm just saying two things there, one that they could be main set if Alchemy didn't exist, and two main set REALLY seems like it needs extra people working on it lately
A bunch of the Baldur's Gate legendary alchemy characters are completely different from their paper versions. Each have 5 transformations with different artwork. Bringing that to paper would be a total pain.
Oh yeah, I'm not saying it would be easy. But it is possible. Which is why one of the sections of the video goes over why I'd even want that in the first place if it's going to be hard
My biggest issue with any online client for magic is that i want to play with my collection.
That's actually a really fair point I didn't consider. I imagine if I ever did try to get into Arena, it wouldn't be long before I wanted MY cards and not to have to recollect them
heyo, resident arena grinder, seems like a lot of folks have a wide variety of takes on this, so i'm here to offer my 2 cents:
(pologies if this thread overlaps with some comments already made, been writing this for a bit) (check the comments, this is a multi thread post)
so by no means are you wrong about the core problem with alchemy as a format, you along with most other folks, arena players and non arena players alike can parse the fairly poor value proposition that the format offers (eg. cards you get being nerfable at any time, lack of refund, ect...), the thing is WOTC (hopefully anyways) knows this too.
so yes, that is always the outlook of the format, but since the outset wizards has tried, and failed to get alchemy to work in some way in arena. these attempts have largely been very mid, and the reason alchemy still trudges on these days without getting straight phased out is primarily a consquence of these two facts:
-Arena needs an over the summer set to base for all of it's reward systems (battle pass [we have one yes, kinda sucks], weekly events, new set draft schedules, ect...), but since after 2020, we've largely replaced Core Sets with UB / MH / Commander focused sets.
-Arena is currently a spot where WOTC tries to invest *hard* on new player agregation, (as the same as they invested in Duels of the Planeswalkers for you all those years ago). UB is ALSO a spot where WOTC wants to integrate new players.
WOTC wants to have it's cake, and eat it too, despite the fact that UB isn't traditionally integrated into standard.
Enter Alchemy. Alchemy is now the place where new players can start off in a 60 card "standard" enviroment, playing whatever jank they want in low tier queue for a bit with their UB... but, sooner or later *then* have to buy into paying for alchemy boosters, while also getting regular standard boosters, to get anywhere meaningful. the fact that they still try to sudo - confuse players into playing alchemy annoys me greatly from a new player perspective.
This is a MAJOR problem that needs to be re evaluated in the long term. Because when they decide to incorpartate the next big UB property into arena, say Marvel, I don't really think the current new player aggregation method of introducing players to a format that they're not gonna really want to play for more than a month or two at most, while holding Spiderman hostage is gonna really boad well. To be fair, idk, whales exist, hopefully anyways most new players are choosing to stick with magic / arena standard because they're either picking up that the comunity doesn't like alchemy, or they're coming to that conclusion on their own while playing arena.
One note I might leave this on for the new player issue, since I do have one take on this, that I think quite a few people like me share. I think a big thing that not a lot of people realize about arena and brawl, arena version of commander ( start at 25 life, 1v1, basically commander lite ), is that while arena's built in wildcard system absolutely sucks for getting 4 ofs for relevant standard / pioneer / historic decks, it's uniquely not the worst system when you're only focusing on casually playing with Brawl decks. For refrence, i started out in arena few years ago, and quickly realized that it was practically pointless for me to save all my wildcards for the "regular" formats, so I crafted up all the cool rares that I could find that would pair with a Sythis commander deck, and ever since I've been able to coast getting the wildcards I want for new brawl decks and playing with the current brawl decks I have to keep on getting rewards.
I think the Arena team may have kind of confirmed, they're looking into creating some kind of commander-esque 4 player experience, with an alchemy release no less: scryfall.com/card/ymkm/25/juggle-the-performance if they could somehow combine a hit 4 player magic experience on Arena as a way to get new folks into the game, I'd beyond glad to see them try to integrate the prexisiting brawl commuinty tighter with the new folks.
Let me be clear though, I do like the design space and potential of digital only cards, especially from where and when I've used them in brawl over the last couple years! But I hate how wizards wants them to exist right NOW. It gives the cool expermientation that's done with digital only a bad rap.
overall, regarding the videos dislike list:
1.) "alchemy exclusive cards could have been printed in paper"
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you mentioned you'd be making a video on how to translate alchemy mechanics into paper, and techically, from the examples you've shown, a fair number can be "translated" to paper
and personally my take on it is, overall, adapability really is a wild gradient between:
"why did this need to be digital?"
"if we did this in paper we'd need more dice / counters than 40k players"
On this, I'll try to explain my experience with digital only cards to explain where translatability is fine, to where it fails to be practical. (one or more of my examples may have been taken by other commenters, so bear with me if i repeat some stuff)
{VERY TRANSLATABLE:}
- starting off, some are incredibly easy to implement, take the "who started first mechanic": (scryfall.com/card/ymid/63/forsaken-crossroads) ( scryfall.com/card/ywoe/29/captivating-crossroads )
- while gemstone caverns (scryfall.com/card/tsr/280/gemstone-caverns) is the only bearer of a "who started first mechanic", and it -enables turn 0 thoracle combo- largely integrated into regular magic!
- mind you, I can make a fruitful guess why they probably aren't reprinting these two, spesfiically, a big one probably having to do with these being instant staples in commander in the same vain that
arcane signet is kind of an instant staple mana rock in any commander deck, so good from a diversity stand point
-by the same merit though i could see this just as well being a mana base reprint equity issue, similar to fabled passage (scryfall.com/card/eld/244/fabled-passage), if the card did get a printing, it wouldn't see a significant reprint for a while, so both sides here.
anywho...
{SORTA TRANSLATABLE:}
getting past this however, digital only starts to become a bit more hazy on what exactly you'd exactly be translating to paper, as sometimes the act of putting a digital mechanic into paper constraints fundimentally diminishes what it was trying to accomplish in the first place
a good example for this is a mechanic you mentioned in a video "seek", let me elaborate a bit:
"seek" [CARDTYPE] is a keyword that grabs a random card that matches the specified quality from your deck. so seeking an elf gives you a random elf card, seeking a nonland card gives you an nonland card from your deck and so on...
definitionally seek exists to brodly give more cards the ability to tutor, at the cost of being able only "kinda" find what you need, not *exactly*, which I think in practice is a good design, especially since other TCGs *do* let you tutor much more often, with similar constraints (see pokemon tcg: pkmncards.com/card/quick-ball-fusion-strike-fst-237/ )
(remember, when it comes to restricting tutoring, we're often the exception in tcgs, not the rule!)
so, for paper while this is "translatable", it looses it's essence at a fair number of levels.
-for kitchen table, while it'd be a bit janky, you could probably get away with addapting it into looking at the top card of your library until you find a card that matches the seek, and then shuffling the rest back in, kind of overpowered "commune with the gods" type effect: (scryfall.com/card/ema/162/commune-with-the-gods), but eh
-but for the organized play level, seeking just breaks down entirely, because it breaks a hidden rule embeded into all tutors in magic, being that all tutors must "reveal" or otherwise make public, the things they search for. You won't ever find a tutor that doesn't do this in some form! (scryfall.com/search?q=o%3A%22search+your%22&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name). This exists at the competitve level becuase otherwise players could just cheat, tutor for whatever they want
But to me at least, trying to fit seek into paper, doesn't respect seek's unique, digital design space, since in paper it won't ever be able to:
-keep the card you tutored secret so you aren't directly telegraphing your current or next turn (impossible because of tutor reveal issue)
-(public information can be more valuble than you'd think modern has an entire deck which relies on abusing this fact: articles.starcitygames.com/magic-the-gathering/premium/lantern-control-is- ready-to-terrorize-modern-once-again/)
-preserve the order of your library, so mechanics like scry can still function (impossible becuase of tutoring necessitating shuffle)
{UNTRANSLATABLE:}
So, onto the nail in the coffin here for pure paper adaptation "perpetual"
-as some other comments have already pointed out, perpetual was implemented as "stickers" in unfinity, and yeah, i don't think anyone's really wanting to bring this back into
( if anything, I honestly wouldn't be suprised if stickers recive wholesale functional eratta ala companion in the next 5 years or so, as they really do have some pretty glaring design issues )
(taste of the madness while reviewing some unifinity nonsense when writing this: www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/y06bij/the_hitchikers_guide_to_stickers_in_commander/)
-I'll be honest, if unfinity is anything to go by, I don't really think perpetual style effects is something that paper magic should try to directly emulate, out of the pure headache that it would (and has) caused for paper.
-the thing is, perpetual in digital only has really run the mile where paper has, enabling a whole suite of intresting designs that work because they aren't nearly as confusing in a digital context, counter to unfinity's implementations in paper
-(scryfall.com/search?q=o%3A%22perpetual%22&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name)
-I won't argue that all of them are bangers, since especially at the start the cards where fairly underwelming since they where still testing the waters, but
-the only two exceptions i'd probabably point out, if you are looking to emulate some of the design space are Skullbriar, and their recent cousin, Me,(the immortal) (scryfall.com/card/2x2/277/skullbriar-the-walking-grave, scryfall.com/card/who/147/me-the-immortal)
-I like this design space, since the "everlastingness" conforms to pre-existing limits, that are easily incorparatable understandable, eg. counters
So overall, I get the desire to try to translate stuff into paper, but especially in the respect of folks playing a cohesive / non mentally taxing game in actual paper for me at least the question stands:
"Sure, you *COULD* implement digital mechanics
-but if it takes a "Goblin Game" level of time do
-or takes a "Chains of Mephestophalies" level of rules understanding understand how to play correctly
-or is generally (annoying / uneventfully boring) to keep track of like daybound
... why are we doing this?
Ultimently, if your opponent(s) (don't understand / don't enjoy) what they have to play against, is it really that great? Why do we want to put this into paper?
(goblin game: scryfall.com/card/pls/61/goblin-game, chains of mephisotpehles: scryfall.com/card/leg/91/chains-of-mephistopheles , daybound: scryfall.com/card/mid/174/burly-breaker-dire-strain-demolisher)
Mark Rosewater when asked on his blog has made a good analogy for this before (can't find the quote verbatim, pologies), but he harkens that:
digital only cards try new things that can (and probably should) only be done digitally (eg: spawing in new entirely cards to the game, perpetually ),
< in the same way that...>
un-sets try things that only make sense for face to face tabletop magic (eg. having a player outside the game decide something, having cards that care about watermarks / art, ect...)
2.) "magic's slide to becoming more like hearthstone"
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*btw, this rant is on the mechanics side, didn't realize that your full argument was more economy focused, but this still is very relevant to some of what I speak on above so i keep this regardless.*
{THE PROS}
I'll say up front, at a fundemental level, digital is still very helpful for me because even outside of MTG, for most tabletop games, I like digital addaptions for games which rely on mechanics where you have lots of: mental accounting / game piece manipulation / cards to keep in order on the board, since I personally struggle keeping up with these in a regular tabletop game.
Put another way, if I can rely on Arena to help me with the busy work of:
-auto tapping with a really big manabse
-auto filling the 19 in my draft deck
-helping me not miss my triggers / reminding me of important things, (like if something has ward)
-auto running a complicated interaction, without me having to search for it for +3 min.
... it helps me enjoy Magic, quite a bit more.
{THE CONS}
but to acknowlage the cons that that Arena causes here's the ick and thin of what I've discovered, after becoming an enfrancised paper player for 2/3 yrs.
first:
the "hearthstone-ification" of magic has been a long standing issue long before alchemy put a face to a name
for example, cards like Abrade ( scryfall.com/card/hou/83/abrade ), and similar multichoice style cards exist to remedy the fact a lot of digital folks tend to only play Best of 1 on arena, thus needing a card with a "sideboard-esque" mechanic built in. ( learned this fact from chorocojo: www.youtube.com/@Chorocojo/ underated mtg youtuber please sub!)
the core fact is that digital only / digital mostly (in my case) players exist, and by extension will nescessitate certain design aspects from MTG that might be counter to what tabletop, or even organized play needs.( while this video talks about many more issues than digital this video from AmmiO2 explains plenty of these digital problems fairly well: ruclips.net/video/tqEb3D5bjVA/видео.html)
second:
from a design perspective, that R & D nowadays often pulls a "eh, we have digital, tabletop can put up with it" approch to designing set mechanics, see:
- daybound/night bound (scryfall.com/card/mid/169/bird-admirer-wing-shredder),
-tracking something that outside limited, and some situations in standard will have very little impact on the game, unless your deck cares about it,
-(e.g. tolovolar: scryfall.com/card/mid/246/tovolar-dire-overlord-tovolar-the-midnight-scourge)
- double face cards / battles (scryfall.com/card/mom/237/invasion-of-moag-bloomwielder-dryads , scryfall.com/card/mom/43/tarkir-duneshaper-burnished-dunestomper?back)
-an undue amount of information being burdened on your opponent to know, just for a simple spell you're casting on curve
-in digital, you can just right click the card, and learn what you need to know, but in paper, it takes a solid 30 sec. to unsleeve reveal, read and put back.
-heavens forbid you forget what the battle does and you need to ask again
-mom was my first "in paper prerelease", and this was a significant draw back to an otherwise cool set
- mainline set tokens which aren't immediatley clear what they do: (scryfall.com/search?q=set%3Atwoe+t%3Aaura&unique=cards&as=grid&order=set , scryfall.com/card/tlci/17/map )
-roles in my opinion really needed some more TLC for their implemenetaiton in paper, never ever in paper does a role relevant card explain what the token is:
-(scryfall.com/search?q=o%3Arole&unique=cards&as=grid&order=name)
-instead you're left to decipher what a "wicked" role is, and again, right click on arena explains this in >5sec. but in paper, it just makes things all the more cumbersome
- by extension for that last one... dungeons ()
-no... just... seriously i have no clue how the same game which has had (6+) returns to a plane about D&D style adventuring could manage to fumble the ball so hard on this when tasked with creating an orignial mechanic to pay homage to the source material
So to tie back to my theis in point 1, let me ask when you say "alchemy cards could have been printed in paper":
By the examples I mention above, we've already been seeding in digital-like mechanics. The diffrence is these cards don't always scream "I'm digital!"
So, by nature digital only cards, incorparate this level of extra, often hard to track detail, by design.
Which would you prefer then?
- generally maintain for paper simplicity whenever possible?
- or try to fit in even more digitally based mechanics, with verying degrees of intutiveness in paper?
and, I don't to provide a false dichotomy, we very much can try to opimize for both, but the fact stands that digital only can at the very least give these mechanics room to breathe without causing an issue.
3.) "non physical cards are non collectable cards"
_____________________________________________________________________
-to be fair, I don't have the same pension as you when it comes to wanting to own cards " in the cardstock " as it where, but this is a genuine perspective I haven't considered until now. I do get where you're coming from too, a similar issue that this mirrors to me is the standard commander decks every now and then, take the pivotal "story cards", like characters or events that should have been in the main set.
-thankfully as of yet, they haven't been dumb enough to try to throw story crucial cards into alchemy, but in the last year they have gotten annoyingly complacent with throwing fan favorite side characters into alchemy only with murders at markov manor promenently gating three rather popular characters to alchemy only: ( scryfall.com/search?q=set%3Aymkm+t%3Alegendary&unique=cards&as=grid&order=set )
-mind you i'm mixed on this, because there are unique design aspects of these new alchemy renditions that I find intresting, even for your Gutmorn example, (scryfall.com/card/ymid/28/gutmorn-pactbound-servant) this is an intresting card that does have a cool play design, this card would totally go into one of my brawl deck, if not be a commander for one. )
-but no, i recognise, that for players who (rightfully!) don't want to put up with the hell that arena can be, doing this really does garner nothing but well deserved ire from folks who don't play Arena, your point still stands, and I really wish Arena would avoid doing this.
4.) "time being used for alchemy isn't used for main sets"
_____________________________________________________________________
- I think this was addressed by some other folks commenting, but arena team is, from what I hear anyways, not directly tied to R & D proper. Overall, that end bit at the video where you talk about issues with Karlov Manor really just seem more like, big picture, Hasbro layoffs, than alchemy interupting that directly. I ain't WOTC, so who's to say. and again with all of the ranting over what I do like about the design space of digital, I don't think time is being "wasted", rather, the time that's being used for digital only isn't being translated into a way that players can effectively enjoy these mechanics.
I personally enjoy alchemy as a draft format. It works super well in limited and is a ton of fun to play with on arena specifically due to how quickly arena can resolve a lot of the interactions and effects that would otherwise take a ton of time to do in paper. What I don’t like is cards being changed outside of draft, and being required to play in formats with them legal and with alchemy changes if I want to play eternal formats. I personally do enjoy playing constructed alchemy too since I can reuse the cards that I picked in draft, but with the shorter set rotation it is quite disappointing. And as for the reason why you hate alchemy, I think it’s absolutely awful that they’d not have the characters also printed, they should only have characters in the alchemy sets that they already printed nonalchemy versions of in the main sets. They used to do that with planeswalker decks and there was nothing wrong with it.
Also I hardly play paper magic anymore due to the cost. I can play arena for free by being good enough at draft, but with paper magic the amount I have to pay for a deck is just too prohibitive to afford anymore.
Yeah make a lot of good points, and it's always wild to me hearing from people that play how Alchemy isn't sectioned off into it's own format. It must be mad to have to keep on top of these digital only cards that can change whenever in formats meant to replicate paper. Weird. And as for the cost, that's getting crazier each year. I feel like Play Boosters were just an excuse to raise the price of draft. Bad times
@@RedBobcatGames Exactly. I’ve been really wanting to play paper magic again for a long time, but I’m the kind of person who enjoys designing my decks and seeing how they do against other people’s decks, and especially with the price of cards and my preferred formats being standard (and probably pioneer) needing new cards constantly I just can’t afford to have fun in paper like I used to.
Preach! I'm in basically the same boat
As someone who plays loves and started the game on innistrahd loved that story and now i also hate Alchemy more now. They even snubbed destroying some cycle cards I like phyrexian annihilator 4 black then we got a white angel equivalent 4 white then alchemy got the red one so no that cycle will be complete .
I never spotted that. Jesus. I really hate Alchemy
They've said that the Alchemy design team have no connection to the paper design team, so them printing the Phyrexian Red-inator had nothing to do with the main team not printing it. It also won't stop them from printing one in future. The Alchemy team saw there was no Red-inator in the main set, so they made their own one.
That said, I'm absolutely livid. I love Emara Tandris so much and seeing a new online-only one fills me with rage. Same with Phyrexian Harvester. I have a Phyrexian Tribal deck for each Praetor and not having the red one in paper kills me.
@ClawedCrab Welcome. I share your pain.
although we had none in that cycle for a very long time and phyrexia is gone again so it still sucks@@ClawedCrab
I don't have friends or money so arena will have to do
Yeah, that's fair. I just wish it were a bit nicer for people to use, and I guess a bit more like paper
Ah, I guess here are some more big reasons they are annoying:
1. Historic Brawl is affected by any buffs or nerfs from Alchemy.
2. Paper cards aren't safe because at any point, they might get special Alchemy counterparts that get nerfs or buffs (Cauldron Cat, Geological Appraiser, The One Ring, etc).
3. This wouldn't be a problem if we had Historic or Timeless or Historic Brawl formats without Alchemy, but we don't.
I'm not saying Geological Appraiser Discover combo wasn't annoying, but it's just an example. RIP in the chat for any folks who invested wildcards into Leyline Geist before that got shot in the foot.
(for my non Arena players, Leyline Geist abused a stupid Alchemy card called Fragment Reality, a 1 mana white Instant that exiled any nonland permanent and then its controller put a random creature card with lesser mana value from their library onto the battlefield tapped. The deck used 4 mana Leylines so that the Instant could target ones own Leylines to always get Geist of Saint Traft on Turn 1. Some decks ran a bunch of cheap protection and enchantments for quick kills in Azorius and some ran edicts in Orzhov for the mirror match. It got nerfed so now Fragment Reality can only target opponent's nonland permanents.)
It did always seem weird to me that Alchemy cards were available in seemingly every format on there. To me they seem like such gimmick cards
I haven't gotten into reading the magic lore, but that is kind of because I don't want to yearn for characters I want to see but never will. Also, Spice8rack made a video about Lorwyn, and apparently Rhys in the book is nothing like how his card is. Flavor fails just feel bad.
Don't ever read the story for Ikoria. The cards depict a much happier time
I had the same visceral reaction when Alchemy came out.
I've come around on it, though, from playing lots of Brawl. Plenty of cards are much more playable and have more interesting interactions thanks to Arena's unique cards and alchemy updates to old ones.
I've also never experienced a card being made worse via Alchemy while it was ever Standard legal. I have, instead, had the experience of Oko being banned and that shifting the meta towards decks that mine had a much bigger loss rate against, as the aggro deck I played at the time went positive against Oko. Alchemy has only ever made cards and commanders more approachable in my experience with it.
I do disagree on Alchemy being 100% able to transpose to paper. Things like Perpetual effects get muddled if a card is sent back to a zone like Hand or Library because there's no guarantee (outside of a singleton format) that you're not seeing a second copy. Other cards like Davriel could be made to work but would need a secondary resource similar to how the silver bordered Urza worked.
I will say, though, a ton of my enjoyment hinges on my resolution to never spend a dime on Arena. After the shit they pulled with Duels, I'm only ever going to free-to-play anything they put out. Arena's lasted awhile and may actually stick around, but I can fund the decks I want more than enough by knocking out dailies and going positive on drafts.
There is a bigger conversation to have here about ownership and proxies, after all. There's absolutely nothing stopping you from having high quality proxies made of the Innistrad Alchemy cards and, given 'lunchroom' Magic is the most popular format, it'd be no issue finding people who'd be okay with you running them in a deck. The only distinction between the proxied play pieces and the 'real' printed ones would be one of tournament legality and that's it. And yet there's always this weird aversion to proxies, that they aren't 'real' cards. There's some capitalistic insistence that these perfectly valid game pieces are somehow 'lesser than', and that's fascinating to me.
Thinking on it, though, they did make 'Sticker' cards from the most recent Un-Set legal in eternal formats, so there is precedence for 'marking' a card to affect it permanently. On the flip side, I can't fucking stand Sticker cards and only ever enjoyed playing them in a fully Un-Set limited environment, so there's that, too.
Ahhh, you beat me to it. I was about to bring up stickers. I do also hate them, and in fairness I never said making them work in paper would be a good idea. Just possible. You're right about bans and Oko etc. But to my brain that falls into a different conversation about FIRE design and power creep. I wish WotC weren't pressured to put out as much product as they were. What's that old saying about quantity and quality?
Exactly all that,@@RedBobcatGames
I personally miss getting to sit and spend time with three set blocks and all that came with it. Of course, it did have its down sides--while I love Phyrexia, I also can't stand Poison, so when Scars block came around I just had to sit out until Innistrad dropped nearly a whole year later. I'm glad we didn't have to waste entire years+ every time they thought I cared to return to Ravnica, at least.
So there's positively *ways* to make Alchemy cards playable at a table, but it does take some really awkward wrangling like stickers, third parties, and secondary resources beyond a token here and there. There is a part of me that respects they're trying to make the most of a digital play space, though I also understand feeling a bit frustrated over things that exist as digital only. It's a mixed bag, even if it does shake out as a means of playtesting how some more 'genre-breaking' kinds of mechanics are received, since a lot of it does push the envelope for what's expected in a normal game of Magic. I remember the first time I came across a 'Draft a card from XXX Spellbook' creature and thinking, "Well that's some fierce bullshit" and have since come around on it, even if I think old One-Eye still kind of sucks.
I may have to start saying "That's some fierce bullshit" because that phrase has power. I think your right about the deisgn space, but I also wonder if Alchemy is to blame with both power creep and complexity creep. The Day Night mechanic for instance feels like it would have worked better in digital. Times are a changing
@@RedBobcatGames It's a great one to say aloud because there's plenty of places to put emphasis in there.
Oh, yeah, I tend to absolutely check out of even the limited scene when a set with dual sided cards rolls out. I played all of one event of March of the Machine before the combination of incubation and tons of dual-sided cards had me going, "No, yeah, I'll explore this on Arena where it's way less of a headache to actually play around."
8:00 the big splashy overpowered dlc to drive sales followed by a series of nerfs post release is a specific and awful kind of abuse video game players recieve often, and that paper expansions could never "solve" even with rotation.
I agree. Things like that should be ironed out before the game is released. ESPECIALLY in a game designed to mimic a physical card game
Ha, I've got a card for you:
---
Begin Anew (GGWW):
Destroy all creatures.
Creature cards in hand get +1/+1 perpetually.
---
The second effect only applies to cards in hand when the effect resolves and persists even after (for example) the cards enter the battlefield go to the graveyard, then return to the battlefield. This can't be implemented in P&P without revealing your hand to the opponent (then putting +1 / +1 stickers on the cards).
Full disclosure: I don't play Arena either -- but there is a totally free game (MTG Forge) that is primarily intended for solo play that implements the vast majority of MTG cards, including the alchemy cards.
I mean, if you're using stickers what's to stop you from marking the back of the card? Or just, you know put them on the front without revealing. Magic has loads of mechanics that interact with cards without revealing them. Foretell comes to mind immediately
@RedBobcatGames I hadn't thought of putting the stickers (or other quasi-permement mark) on the back. You would need to put it on the back of _all_ the cards (not just the creature cards) and the opponent would gain a slight amount of information vs the alchemy card (he/she would know how many of the cards that you had in hand at the time the spell was cast are still there), but this would only be a minor advantage.
Still, it would be a pain in the neck to implement. There's a reason that stickers exist only in "un" sets.
Oh yeah, 100%. My point was never that it would be easy, just that it could be done. And, again yeah some changes would need to be made but again again, Magic do themselves (insert Ardent Angel example). I was about to start typing an explanation as to why I'd even want that if it's hard to do... but stopped myself as I'm basically just repeating everything I said in the video haha
I always thought alchemy was sus from the start. I play arena basically just to keep my skills up for FNM drafts, so alchemy has always been useless to me. Why should I play a card that I’m never gonna see in draft? But I’m also free play only on arena so I don’t have any money in it. I never thought about the concept of characters not being available in paper magic though. That is a bit heartbreaking honestly and you’re right about how the cards are more so used just to push the game and the sales than to have any salient relationship to the story. The story has also become barely comprehensible nonsense anyway.
It's a sad state
I like to play with all my cards on Arena, so I'm stuck playing with Alchemy cards in historic. The One Ring wasn't really made any better, and I hate it.
This is a sentiment I'm hearing a lot. That's rough
didn't really know alchemy got "exclusive" lore characters in it for lack of a better word. but I remember people memeing the huge list of abilities davriel has. if he ever got printed as is I would be forever upset for yet another dungeon like book keeping list of things that the card itself can't explain
Don't look up Urza, Academy Headmaster. You'll be very annoyed
@@RedBobcatGamesI forgot to mention it but at least that is not a tourney legal card
Well that's something at least
Xander's Wake is a fun card and there is no non-clunky way to do it on paper.
Most of this isn't issues with alchemy its issues with Arena's monetization which 1) fair and 2) don't buy gems for Arena and be okay with not being in diamond rank or whatever while you're building your deck.
I like re-balance as opposed to ban because I still get to play the neat thing i liked with just a toned down effect or slightly more expensive.
only so many people can be working on a project at once before adding more people just causes more overhead then help. other folks can work on other things. Getting rid of Alchemy wouldn't suddenly mean more people working on non-alchemy stuff it would just mean the folks who were working on alchemy not having jobs.
You can collect just as much of Innistrad as you could before alchemy Innistrad was a thing.
Hey, never said it wouldn't be clunky. Just that it's possible to do, which would keep people like me from complaining. A big argument I hear for serialized cards is that this game is for collectors but Alchemy proves that wrong.
True, but my main issue is very much with Alchemy itself.
You make a very good point about more cooks spoiling the broth. I hadn't considered that. Maybe those people could go work on whatever it is they've said recently that AI should be doing.
And I literally can't collect them. They're digital and don't exist
I never even payed any attention to alchemy really, even though my dad likes some of the blue/green proliferate stuff from all will be one. I’d see cards sometimes that might be cool for a cube, but went back to apathy with the revelation that they belonged to alchemy. Now, it kind of bums me out that cool designs and interesting flavor are entirely inaccessible to me by virtue of wizards trying for an exclusivity I refuse to buy into
Boom. Exactly my thoughts
THANKS! i think this is a major problem
You're welcome!
“Oh our current Standard set isn’t doing so well hot? Well let’s push out slush art and make digital only cards….because we’re smart.”-WOTC during Alchemy’s conception. And by Odin’s beard do NOT get me started on why Alchemy’s Slaanesh existence is allowed to rotate normally but not paper….
Oh yeah, I've heard about that. Didn't think to mention it though. Still, extra year of rotation is a great idea right? Everyone loves Sheoldred? Right? Can't wait for that next Oko print!
yeah I'm insanely uninterested and largely annoyed by alchemy
tired of seeing online only cards that are functional copies of a paper card, but costs are wildly different
Yup
As someone who is also eaten up by the characters thing, it's just a matter of perspective. The Alchemy team prints separately from the main team, so it's not a case of "We'll put this character in the Alchemy set." It's not that a character got the shaft to appear in the digital set, it's that without the digital set that character would never have gotten a card. Thanks to Alchemy, characters that would never se eprint are getting representation, which I think is nice for the people who like that.
Would you prefer characters get printed only in Alchemy or that they never get cards at all?
Why does that have to be the options? Why not shut down Alchemy, take the team that developed cards for it and put them to work on the paper set. That way everyone could get those cards and play with them any way they like. They'd still be available online too, just like all the other cards on Arena, AND paper players wouldn't have to miss out.
@@RedBobcatGames I know a lot of the mechanics could work in paper, but they'd be quite impractical, I think. I'm not one of them, but there must a be big crowd of people who really like Alchemy and the ways it is unique. I don't think it's fair for me to take their fun away just so I can get some bonus cards
True, but as it stands currently I'm yet to speak with anyone who actually likes Alchemy for the gameplay (If they see this video, I suspect they'll make themselves known in the comments soon enough). I honestly think Alchemy might just be a thing more for Hasbro investors than the players
I love alchemy, but I will say that points 3 and 4 are valid. I don't agree, but they're valid. I just don't care about collecting pieces of paper like some older mtg players do, and it does take time away from... something else, whatever that may be. I think this is worth that time away but that leads into points 1 and 2.
1. There are some cards where this is definitely true with minimal work. There's even more cards where they'd work with a niche change to their design (most perpetual changes don't matter once the creature leaves play). But there's also a lot of cards where I don't want this to work in paper. Like tracking it and policing it would take so much work.
But my main takeaway here is how I think Point 2 matters from where you come from. I play a lot of video games and in competitive, 'live' or early access games, they change all the time. You talked about the outrage of how your favourite card was nerfed and all I can think was, "First time?"
Every single CLEA (competitive/live/early access) game out there goes through rebalancing all the time. Sometimes it does feel like they're doing it just to 'shake things up' and make it interesting again but on the whole I, and most the playerbase, accepts it as it tends to gravitate towards balance and/or freshness. Coming from this standpoint, it's a miracle that MTG hasn't done this before.
The idea that a CLEA game can be released 100% balanced is ridiculous. I love the idea that Alchemy can and does constantly shake itself apart, creating new decks, diversity, balance, and interest. Yeah sometimes your deck gets the can but more often other decks in the meta get canned and it reinvigorates the format.
For your first point, I totally agree. I wouldn't want these mechanics to exist in paper either. I'm just of the mindset that I want to play a collectible card game, and if I can't collect all the cards then I'd rather they didn't exist. In essence, if a mechanic isn't fun in paper, then it should be a mechanic in this game at all. I'm happy for digital card games to exist, but if I want to play one I would. You know? For your second point about rebalacing, I think you're also right. I just don't like it and will continue to moan when I see it happen I suspect. A losing battle, but I don't really care. Having started this channel I now know at least I'm not alone in this opinion either, and with enough of us maybe we can make the gaming industry better (though probably not)
I'm sympathetic to the points on ownership, but I've never been invested in collecting myself. Cardboard feels as ephemeral to me as digital assets, although on principle, I agree that shifting from something you can own to something you can't is ass.
No, I hate Alchemy because I have played it, and it's ass. "Rebalanced cards" more like unbalanced format.
Oh that's interesting. I was really expecting the comments to be full of people telling me to get over it because the format is great to play, and that's all that matters to them. Glad to be wrong
I quit Arena when Alchemy began and later gave away my account to a YT creator I follow.
It had;
15,684 cards with 2953 rares and 609 mythic rares,
21 MR, 66 R, 199 Un, and 84 C wild cards,
33 Avatars,
72 card sleeves,
8 pets,
28,150 gold,
3050 gems,
1 draft token
Happy to not give any more money to Hasbro.
Good for you
(also, I have no idea how much the gold and gems works out too in real money. But I assume from tone that it was a lot)
Alchemy did the same thing with Kiora. WoTC is having problems trying to commission new art or having problems with plagiarism, yet they are having no problems using new art for cards that don't actually exist. It's honestly rather annoying. Especially when it is just wasted on designs that could actually have been made without alchemy.
Yup. I hate it
My big issue with Alchemy is that it infected other formats on Arena. If you want to play with any card older than RtR, then you HAVE to engage with Alchemy cards. If you want to play Timeless, Historic, or Historic Brawl, you can't avoid them, because even if you don't put any Alchemy cards in your deck, your opponent certainly can.
See this last point is ny big gripe with Alchemy. Infecting other formats is exactly it. I don't want to play with these "fake" cards, and I don't put them in my decks... but I have to face every other chump in Historic Brawl that does put them in, I have no choice in the matter.
This is why I just don't play Arena at all. Which I suspect is a shame, because it's probably fun
I remeber having alchemy when after first seeing. Vexyr, Ich-Tekik's Heir. Finally seeing a bant Golem commander for the Splicer creates was fun until i realized there was no paper very. Worst part was thr only reason for it to be digital was its us of seek over search.
And yet we're starting to see more and more Alchemy mechanics printed in paper. At some point I really should do a video on those cards
The only alchemy cards I genuinely like are the rebalanced ones to either make them more playable or bearable to play with/against.
Oh lord, please don't tell WotC that. They'll want to "rebalance" everything next
The Alchemy cards also feel really lazy sometimes. Both in the sense that a lot of these cards can absolutely work on paper (and a lot of the ones that can't can work if you fudge what "perpetually" and "seek" mean), and in the sense that they tend to ignore design choices of the main set (like Kami of Bamboo Groves being a spirit despite no spirits being enchantment creatures, and [someone? Maybe Maro?] specifically saying that enchantment creatures in NEO represented objects being inhabited by a helpful kami).
See, this is sort of what I mean when I say the mechanics could work in paper. They'd need to be fudged a bit, but WotC have done that themselves in the past when porting over digital mechanics to paper cards so I don't see why we couldn't do it too
I'm still pissed that I finally got a new Darksteel creature to play with, since darksteel is one of my favourite concepts in the game, especially since phyrexia got their hands on it. Oh wait, Darksteel Hydra is alchemy
I feel you, you're not alone
Modifying cards in hand without revealing them doesn't really work in paper; that really is a mechanic that can't work without a ref, either the computer or a human. To make it work you'd have to create a 'totally not the hand' zone you move the card to (like a zero mana foretell), but that is still treated as part of your hand for discard, hand look, etc. effects. Which would just be a rules nightmare; 'designate a card that goes to a zone, cards cast from this zone perpetually have haste" turns into a friggin booklet to make sure that that zone still works like your hand for every little thing that cares about hand size, or looks at the hand, or, or, or.
IDK about the rebalancing cards thing. In paper MTG, you don't get refunds when something is banned, either. You can't even resell them for what you paid, because the price drops when it's banned.
But yeah fuck printing 'character' cards for alchemy only.
Sure, but kitchen table magic doesn't have a ban list so that doesn't matter. There's no digital client to literally prevent you from playing the cards. Also, you forgot stickers exist in game now
"I'm so mad about something I have little understanding about"
1. Some of the "reprints" you talk about are not separate alchemy cards but cards that are made by other cards. Silly and clunky, yes. but ultimately lead to some interesting gameplay. Look at Oracle of Alpha (the card that makes Ancestral Recall) - it would be too much to make the power 9 legal in various arena formats, but a 3 mana 2/3 flyer that shuffles them into your deck is pretty cool.
The other reprints were to add baldur's gate and lotr cards to a smaller arena format. If that's good or bad I'm not entirely sure but when most people get mad about "alchemy cards" they arent mad about mirkwood bats - we both know this.
So creating cards, not super doable in paper without an extra deck system.
Seek, maybe doable but not as cleanly or quickly
Perpetual, not doable without the dreaded stickers
2. Rebalancing is almost always buffs. And when it is a nerf its for the best, and you are allowed to play a true to paper format on arena if you like. Should provide some sort of refund though.
3 Do you understand how petulant this comes across? "I'm sad because I can't own physical versions of a thing from a video game" I want a real life buster sword that I can wield just like Cloud does.
3b. Yeah. Gross trend in the industry. you're somewhat informed on your subpoint
4 It's the arena devs not Studio X that make the alchemy cards. Some people might have an issue with this and that's fair. The alchemy cards arent created with the same care and by the same tallented hands as paper cards are - that could be an issue in terms of game balance or other reasons. But thats not the point you made.
5. see petulant
If you're going to be upset about something, be informed. Don't just fabricate points to suit your argument. Complain and rant all you want. But have a point and do your research. Do better.
This comment felt very angry considering how much you seemed to agree with me. But fun to read and you raised some interesting points, thanks for the comment and support
Usually, my problem with alchemy is just the rebalanced cards…. Having the same card do two different things in two different formats is just confusing and ridiculous.
I’m fine with the digital only cards and mechanics even if I’m not really hyped by those, they don’t bother me in the slightest while playing historic or timeless, for example
Yeah, to be fair I didn't even consider how confusing it can be to have the same cards functioning two different ways. You could sort of make that argument about all the Secret Lairs and Alt Art printings too. I may just do that in a video thinking on it, thanks for the comment and inspiriation!
@@RedBobcatGames but secret lair and promos and stuff are just different templating…. The rebalanced cards make stuff like meathook massacre do actual different things in modern and historic….
Oh yeah, I'm not disagreeing. That is much much worse. Just sort of all parts of a greater problem, you know?
5:51 I would love to see this series!!!
It's on my list. Currently WotC keep doing things I feel the need to rage against, and then I want to take a week off making a fun video just for me haha. It's a weird cycle, but I'm enjoying it
I like the rebalancing actually. It allowed for my silly Dungeon deck to finally win some games thanks to the buffs to Venture cards. Rebalancing fixed the problem of blue being unplayable in the CLB Limited. And nerfing cards is better than banning them. I know you dislike errata, but it's not a problem in digital game.
What I dislike about Alchemy is the unnecessary text bloat. The Specialise cards that require you to know six different versions if you want to play around it. The countless spellbooks. Grizzled Huntmaster who spends eight lines of text to basically say "transmute each creature card with X name in your hand and deck into a creature card from your sideboard". But instead of that he has you search your deck and shuffle? Why? Rahilda exiles "random card" from the opponent library, but isn't the top card already random? Couldn't they at least make it a nonland? Tibalt Wicked Tormentor is just disgustingly verbose.
There are some designs that are elegant and use the digital design space well: Patient Zero, Kindred Denial, Begin Anew. But for each succinct elegant card there are two that half-ass the digital potential or abuse it to fit five cards worth of text into one item.
You're right in that it's not an issue in a digital game. But, Magic is a Paper game too and I think a lot of this design for digital attitude is spilling over into the main game. Text bloat as you called it, is happening in paper too. They just removed the words "the Battlefield" from ETBS to increase complexity creep and word count. Plus, yes nerfing a card is better than banning it. But shouldn't they just play test cards more before release? If that's what Alchemy was, a play test format for cards before they got printed in Paper I'd be okay with it. But as it stands, it's warping the rest of Magic around it for the worst
A very important reason to decry Alchemy that you've overlooked is its sheer level of greed. Other than the Baldur's gate set where most of it was just redesigned from a paper set, the regular online-only sets are almost entirely populated by rares and mythics. Often Alchemy releases contain one new common and, say, two uncommons, with dozens and dozens of rare and mythic cards. Keep in mind this is the format the deckbuilder attempts to force new players to build decks in immediately by default. It's just a means to drain players of wildcards that's even worse than wizards' regular fare, because at least the normal cards can be played in non-alchemy formats should they get mangled later in digital nerfs.
As it stands, alchemy is just a place for dumping annoying cards into brawl.
That's a very good point. The way Arena as a whole is treated betrays the way WotC look at it. It's not a game for the players, but a money making machine for the shareholders and CEOS
Part of the reason your positive videos don't do as well might be that you're communicating your negative topics more clearly. "Format bad" works on everybody who already knows magic. "I have some thoughts, predictions and concerns" only works on people who already know you. I'd seen your nintendo thumbnail, but I had no idea what it was about. If it had said "using pokemon cards in magic", I'd have watched it right away.
Fair feedback. I suspect it'll be less of an issue over time then as people get to know my work more, so that's good news
I think I'd like Alchemy if it were only rebalanced cards and no new cards. It would be quite an interesting format to play if standard got boring.
I'd be more forgiving of that to be honest
Honestly they should've used alchemy to test mechanics with the plan to print the cards once balanced into sets that get printed in paper alongside other cards with those mechanic essentially have arena players as play testers for new mechanics that are potentially risky.
And we keep seeing mechanics that can "only work in Alchemy" keep getting printed in paper anyway. That new Discord from the my little pony Secret Lair is a perfect example. I'll have to make a follow up to this video at some point
@@RedBobcatGames I'm saying it's a huge, missed opportunity they wanted to be hearthstone they ignored paper. Questionable mechanics (still feasible in paper) could have been tested and tweaked without releasing a full set of those cards for playtesting on a mass scale. Then when they feel the power level is balanced to what they desired they can release the cards made on arena to a core set, commander set, or horizon set.
So Arena is full of guinea pigs? I bet the players all love that!
If you want to be blunt yes at the fundamental level I mean it already was that way before alchemy. Given the algorithms they have in place. However it has the advantage to help prevent things like oko from happening. They can't play test every interaction and scenarios this would allow them to test mechanics they might think are too weak or too strong to find the balance for the mechanic before releasing the full scale and have more companions and would also reduce the chance of erratas in the future.
Yeah, I guess I can see that. Though my first instinct is that the players aren't play testers, your play testers should be play testers and if WotC don't have enough to prevent an Oko from happening then they should hire more people (or at the very least stop firing them)
So... I come from a different point of view, all I play is cube with my friends and Arena standard, because there aren't really any non-commander players in my area and I don't particularly like commander. That being said, I'd never even touch alchemy, I mostly feel if I wanted to play hearthstone, I'd just go play hearthstone. Alchemy's design pretty much embodies all the reasons I don't wanna play digital card games. MTG's story and flavor sadly died for me with Universes Beyond, hard to get invested for me when eternal formats are a crossover clown circus. Alchemy is just another nail in the coffin. Unless something changes I'm sticking to FtP Arena and proxying cubes.
A different point of view, but the same side of the coin. I 100% agree with what you said
Just saying, in Arena when you craft a card, you get both the standard version AND arena exclusive alchemy card. The alchemy version is only useable in alchemy and the standard is legal everywhere else the card is legal
Fair. Like I say I don't play so wouldn't know. What happens if you bought the card but they nerf it. Can you get a refund?
@@RedBobcatGames You don’t really “buy” cards, you buy packs and accumulate wildcards of different rarities to craft playable cards with. Would honestly prefer if you could.
You don’t get the refund on the alchemy exclusive card if it were to be changed, but if that card has a non-alchemy variant (example: The One Ring) that will never be changed from what its original paper version was, and would be refunded if it was banned. So you could still use the OG Ring in any format it’s legal in.
Not the greatest system, I agree, but respectfully had to give some more context. I’m also new to Arena so it very well could have changed to this before I started playing.
@loch1694 I appriciate it, thank you. Shame about the Wild Card situation though. Even if I had the non-alchemy version I think I'd still feel cheated if that happened to me
A problem that is just the nail in the coffin imo is that even for the alchemy/historic players isn't that great, there was the combo for a turn 1 2/2, that created a 4/4 legendary hexproof spirit token that was just extremely unhealthy to play against, and geological appraiser was breaking havoc on historic for months until they finally nerfed both combos
See this is part of my issues as well. I touched on it a bit in the video, but I think sets need longer in development and more playtesting. We just keep seeing problems come out that need to be banned later. Why is playtesting our job? Why are we buying products that aren't functional and need to be banned?
@@RedBobcatGames Indeed, I agree with that. When you divide your design groups on to "two sets" (one for standard and other for alchemy), you end up doing both poorly due to both lacking resources, I thought that you meant only on the design/creative/flavor standpoint, not as much balance, which I emphasized but I can see now that you mentioned
@xaropevic7918 It all sort of flows together at times. There are so many issues and all of them are kind of connected by the fact that Wizards are being pushed to the brink by Hasbro that sometimes I'll start ranting about one thing and just naturally move into something else haha
As someone who played Arena causally I many played historic and brawl well guess what has Alchemy in it.. Card nerfs and fake cards are so much worse when you don't want to play with them
I find it wild you can't turn them off, and that you're just expected to play with them in other formats. Wild
I am kind of odd. I LOVED playing Magic Duels. I spent far too much time playing it. Then they scrapped it and started Arena. I was in on the beta testing. It was terrible and broken at that stage. I hated playing the broken piece of junk. I hated playing it so bad that I quit. I have since heard that it is much improved. But I got involved in playing another game, and somehow never got back to downloading the public release version of Arena.
What's the other game? And for real, Magic Duels was GREAT!