The Problem With Magic Arena Alchemy Has A Simple Solution 

Spot on impression of Zach, btw. There’s always room for pud.

What a great guy

Absolutely Fantastic, I love it. Always room for more Auntie Donna references.

Lol they call you a pot stirrer? How? Because you point out the shady nonsense for us and they hate that. They need to admit they are wrong on this one and pair the different versions so if you unlock one you get the other version too. It's insane that they saw their ineptitude for designing cards as a fucking business opportunity. That's what I'm honestly more upset about. They design the cards, they are responsible for the bans, so why do I have to pay more to play a standard format with fixed cards? Other card games change the cards in the paper game so why does WoTC get a pass on this? Standard sets are out for a year or longer, so why not have a version 2 print run with the changes, or maybe start putting the fixed rares in the master sets instead of filling it with actual toilet paper/bulk? Its a $200+ product, make it better or stop the reserve list so the value in master sets isn't loaded on 5-10 cards. I'm one guy, I'm sure WoTC could shit out a better plan if they wanted to.

I'm so happy I found my answer before I asked! Auntie Donna fans unite!

Consider the possibility that you are part of a vocal minority. I'm sure you can think of a hobby or fandom that has a toxic subsection of its community, and I think you understand why the creators for that hobby don't listen to that part of their community. In this case, giving us hardcore players what we want wouldn't (as far as I can tell) affect the general player's experience negatively, but it's still a good idea generally to realise the difference betweeen "everyone is asking for this/nobody is asking for this" and "everyone/no-one I talk to is asking for this". Maybe you're too deep into your part of the community to realise how small a part of the whole conversation you're actually hearing.

@@TheEvilCheesecake Or maybe you’re mistaking justified criticism of WotC’s asinine design philosophy as a flash in the pan. This road runs both ways, sorry

@@TheEvilCheesecake Really, tell me three good things Alchemy has done.

I agree with everything you said whole-heartedly.

@@corpsefoot758 the three words at the start of my comment are the most important and you should look at them again.

First time?

@@ForeverLaxx no, but I like the game so much, it still disappointing 😕

wizards doing wizards things

"Enjoy"

This isn't actually true, people have been saying that they should rebalance cards on Arena instead of banning them since the beginning of Arena.

Yeah that's the big problem. A new format is fine but messing with previous ones is just bait and switch.

@@henrymccoy2306 yeah. It makes me not even want to make decks built around powerful new cards out of fear that they will just nerf them. Leaving my deck now not as good and me feeling like I wasted my wildcards

What decks

@@Anthony-kd4rz Yeah, alchemy sucks, but what was magically made illegal? Pretty sure nothing.

@@nightwingaven69 yeh I don't believe what op said, think he is just bandwagoning. All of my decks are untouched. Only a real argument can be made for the white 2 drop but that is one deck

To make Historic a rotating format, simply that. There's no user friendly justification for it.

So they can constantly nerf good cards to force you to spend money to get new cards... they did it for money. And in the process ruined Historic

Um, it literally is it's own thing, you can play Standard, Alchemy or Historic

@@LunkovichTromofski nope historic uses the alchemy cards

@@LunkovichTromofski Like the other poster said, Historic uses alchemy cards, and so does my favorite format in arena: Brawl

i would understand if it some other youtuber but prof? do they even watch the whole thing in the 1st place

If they do not want the pot stirred then they should stop sticking new spoons in it continuously because someone is going to grab one of them and start stirring.

I see I have found the Asmongold Mtg. Some days we just need devs not to talk down to the community and keep their opinions to themselves.

My guess is there're quite a few people at WotC who feel the same way, but the Hasbro overlords are hellbent on pressing every last drop of oil out of their customers.

They are aware of the anger of the fans. They just don't care.

As a player who escaped Hearthstone in 2019, I appreciated how MTG and MTGA were normal cards in both places. No random cards materializing and such. I imagine WOTC could better balance things than Blizzard with MV, spell color and other numbers and things, but I like the idea of playing a game that matches what's in paper. In the meanwhile, I think I have found a tiny oasis in MTGA until we can get Pioneer. Limited. I've checked. Limited doesn't appear to have any of the cards you find in Alchemy. I really want paper BO1 BO3, and Commander in Arena. Alchemy-standard/historic is great when I can play my boys like Omnath 🔥🌳☀💧at least to a degree... and Omnath is not banned in Limited!

I Played alchemy, I was debating quitting MTG arena.

@@willthethrill8661 Same here. Alchemy is just a waste of my time. Hope somebody enjoys it.

How about this Professor, the 1 thing is that Arena is tooooooo expensive if your simply buying packs, and people who just want to play Standard or Historic don't want to be forced into Drafting, the format Arena economy is entirely based around (which is a problem). Keep gem and gold rates exactly how they are in game and in events, it works, however buying packs is the problem, and so for people who buy packs, the solution is simple, When you buy packs in the store, they cost 100 gems, the current best rate which is $1 per pack, means I have to drop $200-300 to get 200 to 300 packs every set If I don't want to draft at all, also all the other ways to collect the "free cards" is extremely time consuming and quite frankly is low rewards for your efforts, and I'm gonna say all the events this applies to, I've been playing since closed beta 2018 and quite frankly I'm tired of this bad system of collecting and it's cost. I don't want to pay for more formats or new cards on top of cards I already have to collect.................thanks for more work WOTC or throw more $$$$ at a video game .............. Arena is a video game all you claiming is a "F2P TCG for the past 4 years can shush and stop supporting wotc's economy and pricing policy aka Hasbro's money maker". They also ruined the mythic vault because in beta " infinite drafters were collecting so many packs that they nerfed the system for everyone" and abandoned any type of quality system. Shit Economy, always will be, and the force feed of marketing and shiny bullshit, real gamers get pissed off at any company that uses wotc's tactics, but all you players with free $$$$$ don't care, well I hope you like the money pit you've sank into MTG whether it be paper or digital. Economy needs to change, it will never, so grats on keeping a low player base and pissing off all the players who think the game will get better somehow. PVDDR even said the pack pricing is outrageous, come on people, fight for a cause for once in your life!!

a year later and no Pioneer. Truly, WOTC has 0 fucks to give.

@@ahealthkit2745 Yeah, it seems even WotC's greed isn't enough to surclass WotC's incompetence

Agreed. I'm waiting on the Winston cube video right now

Agreed I loved that video and it made Winston look really fun

LRR has done a couple of really fun Winston draft videos! Highly recommend them!

Indeed. i liked the new video too. i am always excited about new formats . Especially since I've never drafted for two people but would like to try it out

I bookmarked it ! However, there are FAR too many new videos for me to watch everything the very day (or week) it is posted, regardless of video quality.

Apparently "we" didn't because it sold high enough to create the entire Universes Beyond concept, without them needing to change any of the things "we" told them were wrong with it.

unfortunately the only logic within the capitalist system (an incompetent when it comes to the US, which doesn't even have basic health for everyone) is the search only for profit, they don't care about the players, they want money.

@@altosforteaquax5083 This guy gets it. The older generation are to enfranchised to just leave but there will be a point when they do and if they go to all the effort of selling off their collection they are never coming back. At that point it will be all up to the new playerbase to carry the game.

@@TheEvilCheesecake Magic critic Jesse Mason (of the now effectively defunct blog Killing A Goldfish, still some of my favorite writing about magic) wrote about this idea a number of times. Wizards decides what is and isn't good purely by how much money they make off of it, which ends up promoting a lot of shitty ideas because they're very marketable and dismissing good ideas because they didn't sell well or won't make them grotesque enough profits in the future. The wellbeing of the game and the community are not priorities for them as long as they can keep making loads of money.

Made me think of Diablo Mobile announcement. How out of touch the developers were with their target audience. You own a cell phone right? Ughh

you're right! Runeterra is much better in terms of exclusive digital card game. Who continued to invest time and money on the historic format, even after JHH, shouldn't complain now. I'm sure they knew exactly where WoTC was heading. If they decided to continue to trust WoTC, it wasn't for lack of warning. Nothing is going to change if they complain today, but tomorrow, silently accept and continue investing time and money in Arena. Nothing will change as long as Wizards' profit with the game continues to increase 🤷🏼‍♂️

I jumped ship as soon as historic came out instead of pioneer. The whole thing is an absolutely random hodgepodge of cards instead of, oh, I don’t know, working their way back set by set like they’d been doing initially.

@@charliemallonee2792 "should we start adding the old standard sets back to Arena to eventually build up to Pioneer? Nah, pick these random Modern cards and put them in Historic Anthologies, but also don't bother making boosters for those because we need to maximize profits"

@@charliemallonee2792 Amonkhet remastered utterly pissed me off. Haven't touched Arena since.

Yeahh! I just gave up on farming arena... They are just focusing on digital stuff while they could be supporting both communities (digital and physical)!

Either that or just give necessary, adequate refunds for cards that are changed, like how other digital CCGs did it. Both works, although I will say that having another format in the client will just bloat it even more than it is now but eh, it’s not that big of an issue.

Maybe they needed a last-minute revenue spike to help make the 2021 fiscal targets. You'd think that an extra Standard set would have done that, but alas.

Thought the same here... Until I noticed that the _eternal_ formats are now forced to have the Alchemy cards instead of how they were printed.

It is cordoned off by itself in this horrible little client called "MTG Arena" where the rest of the bad design decisions go.

i thought that was how it was supposed to be

“Not anymore. Now we can do both at the same time. According to myth, the Earth was created in six days. Now watch out! Here comes Genesis! We’ll do it for you in six minutes!” I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist

"Its easier to destroy than it is to create" can much more aptly be put towards, say, destroying your card game for short term profit motivations instead of trying to creating a positive (and sustainably profitable) community around it. I've always felt that phrase to be a cop out by creators. Especially when they create strictly for profit like a major corporation does. Critics do not destroy, they protect their audience from wasting their money. Even if someone says "this sucks don't buy it" they haven't destroyed anything. Its only until someone says "This sucks and I could do better" that it becomes an issue.

@@stepforwardentertainment715 Can you please explain that?

@@genesisbustamante-durian it’s a quote from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

@@altosforteaquax5083 we already do this to some extent.

Except maybe it still be cheaper to build those ideas in paper than in arena =)

@@KavkaObscura but then I need to build all the various competitors decks as well in addition to one I was wanting to test. Whereas in Arena I would just play against them.

@@Kasperblk ah, good point! Ever tried MTGO?

@@KavkaObscura I haven't, although I have considered it because honestly Arena has issues.

A rotation of historic kinda has an anti-flavor in itself. It just shouldn't happen

Remember powercreep means standard sets kinda are rotation for eternal formats too

I was going to post something similar, you can tell this ship is starting to go down. Wotc feels like Blizzard after Vivendi sold them...

This has basically always been true.

Cult!

And that's Capitalism, baby. God it sucks.

@@altosforteaquax5083 I continue to complain even though I haven't bought any cards in over a year. After buying/playing for 19 years, I'm out.

At this point is more likely they get rid of standard altogether than bring pioneer to Arena.

Then there wouldn't be anything to do with all the Alchemy cards once they rotated and they would have to keep banning cards in historic instead of just rebalancing them.

@@falconJB No they wouldn't. None of the Standard cards that they nerfed are anywhere near ban-level in terms of power in Historic.

@@Nr4747 That still doesn't change that the buffed cards should be buffed and the new cards should be in historic.

@@falconJB lol Goldspan Dragon and Alrund’s Epiphany were barely meme cards before the Alchemy gutting. My opponent is welcome to bring out their treasure dragon or their kitty chariot. I’ll just swing in with Phyrexian Obliterator and call it a day.

@@falconJB Well, let's just agree to disagree. I personally want Alchemy to be its own "Standard but weird"-format that doesn't affect Historic or Historic Brawl.

this is revolutionary, get this person a job

How many people should work in "play testing" then? Because any number you'd suggest will either be ridiculuosly large and financially impossible for WotC or so small next to the number of players that it is impossible for them to balance everything. I don't say they shouldn't do play testing but thinking that any reasonable amount of playtesting would result in a balanced game is pure fantasy.

@@michaelroth2166 they make billions per semester lmfao, they have more than enough money, they're no small indie company and these excuses for em is embarrassing

I see the primary issue with using Arena for this would be spoilers, or rather speculation. WIzards wouldn't do this because it would make a big impact on the speculative buying of sealed products. "Why pre-order this set?" Or "Put off buying those lands, they're about to be re-printed" etc

No no no, that makes too much sense!

The problem with the refun argument is, what if you are playing a deck built around a main card or two. Your deck doesn't really function without those cards. They nerf them, down to the point where your deck no longer really functions. Even if they refund you 8 wild cards for the playsets of the nerfed cards, that doesn't help you with all your other cards. Cards you may well not have crafted if not for the altered cards, which you will no longer play and so have no use for. The 8 wild cards is not enough to get going on your new deck

You didn't "buy" anything, you were given a digital licence to use WotC property.

@@dogdriver70 Dude, this is like the worst time to try and make that argument. While you're technically correct that none of the content on Arena is truly purchased, they entered the game on the understanding that if they spent their time (and money) on this game they would be given access to specific content and now WotC is altering the content that they earned.

@@automaton1740 its never a bad time to state the cold hard facts. That user agreement we scroll through so we can play says things. Important things, and we all Agree.

@@dogdriver70 Hi WotC.

@@dogdriver70 🥾👅🥾👅🥾👅🥾

As a hardcore Modern player, I'm all for Pioneer getting attention. Why not give players a more affordable non-rotating format in paper with digital support in Arena?

Last week I was saying exactly that to a friend. Bring Pioneer the format and than build up the rest of the sets...

That was the old plan they shouldn't have strayed away from :/

@mattador_actual And they justified it with "if we had worked on Pioneer you wouldn't have the new gameplay experience you have now with Alchemy in the same short time!" Like, what? If they had worked on Pioneer instead of the Alchemy and Jumpstart nonsense we would be at least half way there *and* we would have had new "gameplay" each time a remastered block dropped.

It would also provide WotC with actual data that would show what their players are interested in playing. I don’t believe for a second that “splitting the player base” like that in Historic would have a noticeable impact. If it did have an impact, it wouldn’t be in Alchemy’s favour, which is reason that perhaps Alchemy isn’t a good thing for MTGA.

See you in runeterra.

Sad to see you go, but good bye I guess

@@JoelChenFa noooo but they door the saaaaame thinking in ruuuneterraaaaa!!!!! Jokes aside I only play commander for magic, when I want to play a competitive card game it's legends of runeterra.

Same

Nobody cares

And if you scroll through the topics, it is the most numerous reposted topic with varying rewordings of leave historic alone. If they don't know the criticism, they are actively trying to avoid seeing/hearing it.

So that explains the increasing number of blue hairs on the arts

Even amongst English speakers, wotc only cares about US and to a lesser extent UK players. Australia gets entirely ignored. Even when Aussie players were entirely COVID free in most states we were not getting physical product until many months after the US

I launched Arena last night to check out alchemy and decided I didn't want to make a deck right then. So I was just going to use my favorite historic deck for a couple games. When I realized I couldn't do that, I just turned the game off

@@getjaketospace I just had a similar experience. Pretty disappointing.

That's what I call transparency. LeL

@@getjaketospace Same i HAD 8 decks to play historic with, decks ive spent MONTHS and $$ to create, and now i have 2 decks that i can "play" in historic 1 my goblin aggro and the other sadly my mill my most beloved deck where not only have i optimised to the best of my ability but spent soo much $$ on gems to have the alt arts on cards to now have the deck be nearly useless due to the fact ppl can just add cards out of thin air to their decks now im no stranger to ppl reshuffling cards from the yard back to their decks and have found ways to combat this what ive now founud to be the prob is ive lost games where ppl have had only 2-3 cards left in their library after adding 8-12 extra cards to their deck or they create a card outside of their color identity/ create a card i cant noramally side board into to counter play it since of the crazy amount of randomness it makes it so hard for a my mill to gain momentum and lock down the game. I dont feel like i should have to make Alchemy formated decks to play the format i normally play it should be its own lil neiche format where i play it if i want to sorry rant over

@@getjaketospace Like i like the "idea" of alchemy where it would be its own format to have fun lil brews with BUT my main format on arena is Historic and thats where most of my $$ and time has been spent and its now trash. Yea the meta changed but it now feels like its this joke of a format with a whole bunch of useless bullshit that ruins some of the core mechanics of the game and im just alil tilted that this is what has happened to arena and it has become 1 of my mainways to play mtg and i feel now its ruined i guess back to my lgs and playing modern i guess......

My buddy has a really good Odric deck

Isn't feeling attacked the point of a Darien deck?

Exactly. The only way that I can still participate in Magic (a game that I enjoy), produced by a company whose only concern is sucking as many dollars from the pockets of its players until it hits lint, is by playing on my own terms. Quit Arena completely, taking an hiatus after RNA Standard; played ELD Standard for 2 weeks; then played ZNR Standard for 1 week before deleting my account. Switched to MTGO in May. Bought 2018/19 Challenger decks to play with my son when he is old enough. Aside from that, have zero interest in new Magic product. Neon Kamigawa is tempting me to play Pre-release in person, as I want to get back into Limited, and am looking forward to Kamigawa Another reason why I switched to MTGO (flashback limited sets). I have zero fucks with regards to the amount of product that WotC pumps out because I have no intention of purchasing it. Yet it still pains me to see Magic used as a vehicle to treat the players as walking piñatas full of dollars, rather than focusing on the health of the game. I have very little faith in WotC medium, let alone long-term. But I will still add my voice to the chorus of dissent for how Alchemy had been implemented because the fuckers have form in this regard re: the whole 2 WC for 1 Historic card, and they need to be called out for their predatory practices.

Because, for as much backlash WotC gets for these decisions, they know (and the investors know) that there are enough whales and addicts to offset it all and increase profits. Ever-increasing profits is what always drives a company once it grows too large.

@@ForeverLaxx WotC reached the "Too big to fail" point. The fact that despite everything that they have been doing to the game, they still almost double their profits every year is the proof of that

But consider this: How do you expect them to create new card which are fair and balanced if they have no way to test what "fair and balanced" actually is? Using Alchemy they can tweak and fine-tune balance until they are familiar with what really makes an overpowered or underpowered card, and hopefully that leads to overall better quality and consistency of future paper magic releases. You can't really say that grossly overpowered cards which can never be changed (without an outright ban) are healthy for the game, right? I understand that some people might find them fun to play, but they are certainly not fun to play *against*, and that leads to negative experiences of MtG, which leads to people quitting or being turned off to picking the game up in the first place.

But wtf will they do about the pro scene, then? Don’t all of them only play Standard?

Paper magic is a huge cash cow and people will still play standard on Arena, they will only start ignoring standard if Alchemy is so popular that people stop playing standard.

You are absolutely right. Alchemy is a great excuse for Wizard to stop even trying to make a good standard in the first place.

@@corpsefoot758 Yep, and drafting is largely based off standard sets, they would be choosing to just not make as much money if they stopped bothering to try to make good standard sets.

Or you could look at it a different way: They can gather information about balancing in Alchemy, and use that experience to design more balanced cards from the outset of new releases.

Pretty much all the recent changes have pushed me away and I was a player buying $100 gem packs and season passes. I guess that wont happen anymore.

The way ever increasingly high value generating cards had been implemented in hearthstone made it impossible to keep "card advantage" relevant when a single card could generate multiple other cards, creating far greater value and board presence than a draw spell ever could. Coupled with a complete lack of instant speed interaction, it made some matchups feel atrocious and cards that couldn't naturally 3+ for 1 feel awful. It created a level of power creep that made playing feel awful. Beyond that, I feel like mtg arena is learning every lesson hearthstone had learned years earlier about digital only cards the hard way. The second I saw companions, I knew it was going to be a mess because hearthstone already had powerful cards that care about deck construction and those had to be nerfed and power-crept into oblivion.

Don't play those cards then. Simple. Stick to paper formats.

@@ryanparker2696 Aye, that's what Im thinking. Gonna stay away from Arena moving forward

Such a weird perspective. How is conjure any different from drawing, cascade, tutoring etc resource-wise? These mechanics aren’t inherently bad at all, they’re things MTG designers have been wanting to do for decades but couldn’t due to physical limitations. Look at things like wishes or Skullbriar

Wizards in a nutshell, my man

This. I can kind of get Field, since it seemed like every other deck was running it, sometimes with no synergy whatsoever, but Ugin was a completely fair card. Strong? Absolutely. But not busted, from my experience. And Agent of Treachery makes even less sense. I've only ever seen it in ETB decks, and the occasional control deck (usually synergizing with other steal stuff things). I wouldn't be mad if they gave wild cards. Sad that I lost fun interactions? Yes. But not mad.

That wasn’t due to Alchemy, those cards were just banned from Historic Brawl

These Historic Brawl bans had nothing to do with alchemy and are actually really good, these cards weren't healthy for the format. Also it's just 1 card in HB, as much as I dislike a lot of Arena this is not that big of an issue as long as they don't ban Commanders

While I do think the bans were a good thing overall (especially Agent), I do 100% agree that you should get your wildcards. Not giving them to you is just WotC being greedy.

It would also require stop using the business model of heavily pushing a few rares and mythics to boost sales. A model that, funnily enough, does not really apply to Arena, but then Alchemy means you need to get more cards on Arena, when your best cards get nerfed.

@@alfyb4512 The digital-only cards are SO ridiculous too, that it kind of makes buying the "regular" cards pointless anymore. They're making Arena into Yu-Gi-Oh.

This is really the problem; they created a fun format... and destroyed it literally a week later with that new Jumpstart set and its digital-only mechanics. Now there's more of them to make it worse! For the past few months I've simply stopped playing games where digital-only cards show up. As soon as I see a digital-only card, I concede the game, regardless of how it's going. This is not really a solution: the person playing those cards is presumably just trying to play the game and have fun, and ending games prematurely stops that. But I really don't want to play against those cards. Maybe if they stopped showing up in games I'd start appreciating them and maybe even playing them every now and then. I did enjoy the Jumpstart set. But bringing them into Historic Brawl was a really bad choice.

Same answer though - just need Pioneer Brawl !

Oh, is there a vid where he talks about them? I've noticed them on the shelves many times but haven't heard him bring them up. Also is one of the backdrop bookcases from a while ago I noticed that there were six books from the cycle on the shelf, and it drove me nuts wondering why it wasn't all seven! :-D

@@CanuckMonkey13 iirc it was in one of the Q&A videos

You can play MOL, is much better than Arena, despite the interface

@@williamft4672 MTGO still sucks. There are zero ways to gain new cards for free. I eventually built up a nice UB Rogues that got me to Mythic off of only a few dollars to kick off with. If you tried to do that on MTGO, you’d have to be Reid Duke to pull that off.

@@curts7801 but currently, you can spend time and money building a deck in Arena, and soon they'll release a new pack of cards without even warning. At least in MOL your time and money is not wasted overnight

@@williamft4672 if you’re willing to spend money and don’t loathe the old ass client, MTGO would work. Me, I’ll just go back to hearthstone for my mobile game, and keep MtG to paper.

@@curts7801 there is Runeterra too hehe

I thought i watched that one too, must have imagined that :)

Serious question: how did alchemy affect historic?

@@barrosinc several cards have already been changed what are you talking about it literally affects the format

@@TheGrimmjowisaboss that's what i was asking. I thought the changes were for alchemy format

@@barrosinc no they're tied together I don't know why but they are

@@TheGrimmjowisaboss that's pretty stupid

Historic was meant as digital only format from the start. As bad as Wizards comunicates sometimes, they were always clear about this.

@@berndb3141 I'm still learning clearly

@@du1987de Fair enough. There are many paper formats out there you might enjoy or you just play casual without format boundries. Paper Magic is great.

@@berndb3141 There's almost too many, I often have to look up what each format is and why it exists. I've always liked the idea of magic and TCGs in general but don't really know anyone to play paper with. Sometimes I just browse scryfall for fun.

Not a bad idea. I would be concerned with how will we be able to keep up with all the sudden lost cards from our card pool without constantly keeping up with all the changes, it would be a nightmare, but not a totally unsolvable problem, we can fix that. But, yeah, any sort of refunds would be nice tbh, not giving refunds was the biggest problem Alchemy has in the first place.

If your deck still contains the cards but you just don't have them any longer, this should be a piece of cake.

@@Metalcursine the problem is more about how do you translate that into something that don’t overwhelm the player when they open the client. Imagine this, you open the client after a month of inactivity, and suddenly you find out 3-5 of your decks can’t be used anymore because of the “lost cards”. Yes, we can just go into the decks and replace those cards, start reclaiming the wildcards, etc, but imagine having to do all that, every once in a month, not to mention the research you have to do in finding out why said cards are changed in the first place, and evaluating whether it’s worth it to keep the newly changed cards or not. It can get overwhelming, when these players probably just want to get into a short, quick game or two.

They are greedy bastards, they are never doing that

Another problem with this is that owning the altered version of a card is linked to owning the unaltered Standard-Legal version. Right now, when you craft one, you get both. Doing the refund in the way you describe would mean they would either have to rewrite the whole system - and the most likely implementations of this would bring even more problems that I won't get into in this post - or they would have to remove BOTH versions of the card from everyone's accounts when refunding the wild cards. That would mean that players like me and the Prof who play Standard but not Alchemy would have cards disappearing from our Standard decks every time they got nerfed in Alchemy, forcing us to recraft them all because of a format we don't even play!

Also, it explains why they no longer wanted to continue having Arena forums running. At least there are still "votes" and reports available, I saw thousands of those saying that Historic is now "broken" because of Alchemy, hopefully they will address it and in a timely manner.

As a paper-magic player I also strongly dislike the concept of Alchemy. These are cards, you can never play in real magic. You can no longer transfer decks from historic to paper or the other way around, because the card's on both sides are not the same anymore. Also if you play a card on one side heavily you will do misplays on the other side, because the cards suddenly function differently. I am not a fan of alchemy existing, but I could live with that. But I am incredibly pissed off, that I cannot even opt out anymore. I cannot play with real magic cards on MTGA anymore..... One more thing: In general, a card that isn't even banned in standard usually never needs to be nerfed in historic. Very strong standard cards are the only thing even playable in historic. The whole concept is illogical. It just makes some good from standard cards unplayable in historic.

I did too. They are a total mess anymore.

Nothing wrong with the people who "made" this game (Richard Garfield and other people back in pre-1993), the problem is the people in charge of the game currently :)

“Talk”? It just takes one symbol, duh: $

@Juan Catari Pacara what will you use then?

Richard Garfield is the truth. Mark Rosewater on the other hand...

The problem is not the people who make the game, but the people who, despite complaining today, will silently accept tomorrow and will continue to invest time and money in Arena. Nothing will change as long as Wizards' profit with the game continues to increase 🤷🏼‍♂️

This makes complete sense. I would likely do the same if I was a Commander player (which I would be if I had an income and more time!) I feel your pain, friend.

And that’s why I quit hearthstone back in the day, nerfing is a lazy design encouraging policy with little respect for players decisions. It is either a system of injecting short term hype to cards, or a inability to foresee the play environment and just let the players solve it and then punish them.

Similar experience here, except I've been playing since open beta launched. I put together a seriously competitive Historic deck for the first time about two weeks before JHH launched. After JHH released, I played one game against the Vesperlark combo and gave up in disgust. Even after they fixed the Davriel cards to prevent that combo, I had no interest in playing Historic, and now even less. I did play the Alchemy launch event (I'll play anything free just to try it out) and most of my games were fine, but the one game I played against a Toralf's Disciple deck made it clear that the format is not for me outside of free events.

yup yall are spot on. i stopped playing arena two months ago. super glad i missed this alchemy bs

you're right! Who continued to invest time and money on the historic format, even after Jumpstart Historic Horizons, shouldn't complain now. I'm sure they knew exactly where WoTC was heading. If they decided to continue to trust WoTC, it wasn't for lack of warning. Nothing is going to change if they complain today, but tomorrow, silently accept and continue investing time and money in Arena. Nothing will change as long as Wizards' profit with the game continues to increase 🤷🏼‍♂️

How is Alchemy aimed at exploiting anyone less?