While Standard Magic: the Gathering languishes under the lash of the tyrant Vivi, I've been fooling around in Alchemy. MTG: Arena's digital only format isn't widely beloved, and it has definitely hit some bum notes in its lifetime, but the more frustrated I am with Standard, the more I appreciate what Alchemy has to offer. And I'm only partly saying that because the latest balance patch has made my pet deck suddenly way better.
My colleagues have thoroughly hashed out the case for how moribund Standard has become in other articles; with the biggest ever card pool and more busted cards than ever, the format keeps being dominated by one or two broken decks that flatten the competition.
Stats on MTG Decks suggest Izzet Cauldron is currently over 21% of the meta, while Monored Aggro makes up more than 20% despite being targeted with multiple bans during the last MTG banlist update.
The Alchemy meta is just way more diverse - MTG Decks suggests 43% of the meta is divided between Rogue Decks that don't belong to a major archetype - and Izzet Spells is only 11% of the meta. No doubt that's partly because people aren't playing Alchemy to win tournaments, they're playing it for fun, so more of the player base is experimenting instead of net decking - but I don't really see that as a downside.
Alchemy has a smaller card pool than Standard, with a two year rotation. This includes 150 additional made-for-Alchemy cards, but it's still many fewer cards than Standard. That reduces the risk of overpowered interactions between cards printed years apart: Alchemy players have never been able to pair Vivi with Agatha's Soul Cauldron, so when you kill Vivi in Alchemy you don't have to worry about it haunting you from beyond the grave.
As a digital-only format, Alchemy doesn't actually have banned cards - cards get digitally rebalanced. Among other changes, the latest balance update changed Vivi so that you've got to tap him to activate his mana generating ability. He's still a house, but the opponent has much longer to interact with him before he starts to combo off.
Izzet decks have responded by shifting even harder into a spells shell that looks a bit like Storm, using the Alchemy only Swiftspear's Teachings to give Vivi haste when he enters, and Shore Up to untap him - giving up on other tools in the process.
While bans can only play whack-a-mole with problem cards, rebalances can actually buff weaker archetypes. Having lots of healthy decks is vital to keeping the best decks in check, forcing players to plan for their deck's natural predators rather than just executing their primary game plan as fast as possible - and Alchemy doesn't have to rely on new sets printing answers.
Alchemy-only cards are the flashiest part of the format. They can have any effect the developers can code, but in practise they all feel like Magic cards, albeit doing things that would normally break the rules. The most common effects you'll see are Seek, which pulls a card of a certain type at random from your deck; Permanent changes to cards that persist between zones; Conjured cards that enter play from nowhere; and abilities that let you Draft, conjuring one card from a selection.
Alchemy supplemental sets have just 30 cards, and they're almost all powerful, often archetype defining. A lot of them are pure Timmy fodder - stuff like Ornate Imitations, a sorcery that costs blue green and X, and which conjures random creature cards with each mana value from one to X onto the battlefield. That overall power level reduces the gravity exerted by Standard's design mistakes.
The deck that I'm running - a pet monowhite Spacecraft matters deck - is a midrange White Weenie variant. The most important Alchemy card - Squadron Carrier - is an uncommon that mostly provides card advantage. I couldn't call a single card in it a bomb, and it's not a combo deck. It beats aggro by outlasting it, and combo by undercutting it. It's not quite Magic as Richard Garfield intended, but it feels a lot closer to that than Standard does at the moment. You should give it a go.
Do you have a favorite Alchemy card or mechanic? Or did you try the format and bounce off? Come and share your tales in the Wargamer Discord community.
Wargamer's handy guide will help you keep up to date with the MTG release schedule, though that does only cover paper Magic. The MTG Avatar: The Last Airbender is next up - it will be coming to Arena, but won't have an accompanying Alchemy sister set.