Alchemy Arena Only Cards I Wish We Could Tweak for Paper

Magic Arena has regular expansions in the guise of Alchemy cards that add digital exclusive cards to the card pool. These are legal in Alchemy tournaments and also in Brawl, where you’re most likely to come across them. Most of these designs use mechanics that are impossible to replicate in paper – but a few of them could work with a few tweaks. Here are some of the Alchemy Arena only cards that I wish we had in paper.

TRANSLATING ALCHEMY CARDS TO PAPER

Before I really get stuck in here, I just want to clarify a few things. Firstly, though there are dozens upon dozens of kick-ass Alchemy designs, so many of them require the computer to be an un-bias randomized third party in order to execute them that we couldn’t get anything close to the original design or intent on a paper card. Secondly, I’ll be doing my best to argue how we could get a similar card with a few tweaks in paper (if they’re necessary) – you might not agree with the tweaks I propose, and that’s fine, as we’re just spitballin’ here. 

Finally, keep in mind that the design team for Alchemy are entirely separate to the team that design paper cards. Nobody is withholding these designs from us on purpose, and indeed we might get some of them in paper in the future (like a certain Mardu Commander in our Mystery Booster Commander article). 

ARENA ONLY ALCHEMY CARDS I WISH WE HAD IN PAPER

ARCHAOMANCER’S SPADE

First up, let’s look at this mana rock. It’s restricted to RW/x decks for a start, and taps for RW – but you can’t spend that mana to cast spells from hand. The part that makes it an Arena cards is that it asks you to seek two cards with flashback and put them in your graveyard. Seek is essentially a randomized tutor for cards that meet a certain condition, and Arena handles the randomization of that selection.

To get this card in paper, the closest thing you could put on it is using the Cascade or Discover design space to find those cards, and then put them in the graveyard instead of casting them or putting them into your hand. “Reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal two cards with Flashback. Put those cards into your graveyard, and then shuffle the rest back into the library.”

The reason this mana rock would be sweet in paper is due to how many RW decks would love a little extra mana for activated abilities. You’ve got Equipment, yes, but also creatures like Zirda the Dawnwalker and Osgir the Reconstructor, you’ve got Food and Clue tokens, you’ve got Flashback spells… Totally a doable card in paper with a little tweaking.

SPIRITED SIMULACRUM

Solemn Simulacrum is a pretty old Magic card at this point, and if that makes you feel old, you’ve been playing a long time. Where the Spirited Simulacrum improves upon the Solemn one is in the fact it can be warped, and also that it ensures the card drawn when it leaves play is a spell and not another land. 

To fix this for paper, you have to use the same fix for Seek we already talked about – revealing or exiling until you hit a land, and shuffling the rest back in. Same for the leaves trigger, and you have a perfectly serviceable card. While this “fix” for Seek will never truly replicate the randomness of Seek (because you can stack the top of your deck with anything from Brainstorm to Scroll Rack to Mortuary Mire), it’s a mostly reasonable translation, as long as you’re never casting the card that you got from a Seek ability as part of that ability resolving. 

As for the card in paper? I’d love to stick it in my reanimator and flicker decks. It’s sweet. 

HONOR THE PAST

Most Alchemy cards need a little tweaking, but Honor the Past doesn’t need any at all. We already track type changes in paper for as long as the permanent is in play – and crucially, this one doesn’t say perpetually, which is an Arena-only mechanic that actually does change a card’s rules text or power & toughness for the rest of the game regardless of zone changes. 

Honor the Past is a pretty fair reanimator spell, especially as we lose the ability to attack with what we brought back. In the average white deck this is a trade-off. In multicolor decks that are trying to do silly things, they already have pretty broken reanimator spells that are much better. Honor the Past would be a cool supplement to white’s other reanimation which tends to be expensive, or restricted to lower mana value or power values. 

GALATHUL GALECALLER

Storm Crow is more of a mascot than Loot in many ways, and a card that has been memed extensively at this point, from Unstable to Mystery Booster and beyond. Galathul Galecaller is a perfectly reasonable win condition for a flyers deck that wants to put lots of cheap flyers into play and buff them. It also needs to survive combat for you to get the opportunity to cast Corvid Squall, making it require some careful play and clear skies to pull off.

What’s stopping this being a paper card is the fact it asks you to Conjure the cards, not make token copies of them. Conjure is a digital-only mechanic that creates cards which aren’t in your deck or sideboard, effectively meaning that you could replay those Conjured Storm Crow cards from your hand if they were bounced there – and anything that specifies “nontoken” would trigger off of them. 

The easy fix, then, is to just create a token of Storm Crow instead.

VAL, MAROONED SURVEYOR

Val, Marooned Surveyor is a really flavorful addition to the Duskmourn roster. She’s arrived there from elsewhere, that much is clear, but given her getup, she looks like she might have arrived from the Edge area of the multiverse covered in Edge of Eternities, which is a place I’m already keen to revisit. 

There aren’t that many Naya Commanders that do indirect burn from something that isn’t tokens or +1/+1 counters, so Val is a welcome addition to the Naya roster, too. Burning each opponent while gaining life off of each Discover, Investigate, Scry or Surveil is sweet, and leads to some interesting deck construction. The only word that doesn’t  work here is Seek, and honestly? I’m fine for just printing this card with seek omitted, or hell, if you build it as is with no seek cards, I’d still play against it. Card is very cool. 

STORMFORGED ARMOR

We’ve made iconic tokens of Ajani’s Pridemate and Tarmogoyf already, so why not add Ball Lightning to the mix? Stormforged Armor conjures a Ball Lightning tapped and attacking when the creature attacks, which is badass. What’s even more badass is that you can tap out for a creature with Haste and still equip this by paying 3 life, something I would very much like to do in Isshin or Aurelia, the Warleader.

While there are edge cases where conjure is relevant versus creating a token, for the most part, the Ball Lightning here acts much like a token in that it ends up being sacrificed at the end step. I don’t think we’d be losing that much to not be able to then dig them out of the yard at a later time.

CINDERCONE SMITE

Is Cindercone Smite the most powerful card? Not really, no. But what I love about it is how it speaks to a big part of modern-day Commander – the effect that turn order has on your likelihood to win a game. This kind of design space is underexplored in Commander; while figuring out an actual rules change level intervention to assuage concerns over going third or fourth is incredibly hard to balance and hard to roll back, printing catchup cards that care about turn order is something that could and should be looked at more often.

A sorcery speed way to snipe an x/2 that might be free to cast if you didn’t go first seems pretty fair. Make it a tapped treasure if we’re really concerned with balance. 

TEYSA OF THE GHOST COUNCIL

Teysa of the Ghost Council is responsible for a bunch of the wins I’ve had with my Syr Vondam, Sunstar Exemplar Brawl deck. Turns out hiding away your threats (hello also to Obzedat, Ghost Council) is great against control decks hoping to untap and topdeck another removal spell, who knew?

Teysa makes a 1/1 Flyer when she enters, and you can flicker her to increase her intensity. Spirits you control get +X/+0, where X is her intensity. This is an extremely fair card, and you could easily track intensity with Experience counters or another type of counter. Would proliferating them really be that busted? I’d say no, not at all. 

That way, we get another badass Teysa card in paper, which is only a good thing. 

END STEP

Most of Alchemy’s designs are too complex to translate over to paper. That said, the cards themselves are often well designed, and when there are cards that could easily hit paper with a few tweaks? It’s hard not to feel a little longing for those cool designs. It’s a way to explore more of our favorite planes, after all, which is only a good thing. Which Alchemy card do you wish you could play in paper? Let us know on socials.