Strange things are occurring in the world of Magic: The Gathering. Double-sided cards have been around since 2011, arriving with the transforming monsters of Innistrad. But there’s now a card that has not two, not three, but a whopping six sides. How can this be, you ask? Does this not defy the laws of trading card physics? Well, that’s not a problem in the digital-only MTG Arena format of Alchemy, where cards can have effects that would never work in paper magic.
The six-sided card, Viconia, Nightsinger’s Disciple was revealed by Wizards of the Coast in an MTG Arena update on Wednesday. It depicts a villainous Elf Cleric from the old Baldur’s Gate games, and is part of Alchemy Horizons: Baldur’s Gate, the D&D themed Alchemy set coming to Arena on July 7, 2022. Like Pokémon’s Eevee, this card can ‘evolve’ into a ton of different forms.
Viconia starts out fairly plain, as a 2/3 elf that can exile cards from graveyards. Where things get complicated though is with the new ability Specialize. This lets you discard a colour or land of your choice to transform Viconia in one of five different ways. She can become Viconia, Disciple of Strength, Blood, Arcana, Violence, or Rebirth, depending on which colour you pick.
We’re not going to cover the full effects of each of her faces in writing because we’d be here all day – this card has hundreds of words of rules text in total. To summarise though, each one involves conjuring castable copies of cards exiled with Viconia into your hand and giving them slightly different abilities, like extra power, or a life draining ETB effect.
It’s not clear if Viconia is the only card like this in the new Alchemy set, but we’d guess that she’s not. In the Arena announcement, Wizards describes Specialize as a brand new mechanic, so it seems highly unlikely that they only got one use out of it.
We’re not yet quite done with the strangeness of this card. It’s notable that the character Viconia has already appeared on a card, Viconia, Drow Apostate, in the main Commander Legends Battle for Baldur’s Gate set. The two Viconia cards have exactly the same artwork, but they have completely different abilities.
Alchemy Horizons seems to contain a number of cards that are reusing artwork from entirely different, pre-existing cards. Gate of The Black Dragon has a new name and new abilities, for instance but exactly the same artwork as the card Black Dragon Gate. The same thing is true of Jon Irenicus, The Exile – it shares artwork and half a name with Jon Irenicus, Shattered One, but mechanically, the cards are entirely different. It’s all a bit confusing.
Viconia, and the rest of the Alchemy Horizons cards, will arrive on MTG Arena on July 7. For more Arena content, check out our guide to the best MTG Arena decks.