Explore the Realm of Magic: The Gathering - Articles and Insights

Smuggler's Surprise has completely disappeared from the radar of the Standard format for many months now. The card has not been played at all since the rotation. The strength of aggressive decks like Mono Red or Boros Aggro has definitely contributed to pushing this archetype out of the metagame. Today, however, we are not talking about Standard but about Alchemy and the reasons are many: In the format the card pool is small compared to the standard one and strategies of this type (almost comparable to an otk) could benefit greatly from this;

Naya Convoke was definitely one of the most dominant decks in Alchemy Best-of-One last season, which ended not too many months ago with the arrival of Bloomburrow! This date, in fact, marked the rotation of the format the beginning of a new metagame, where Convoke could no longer be present, having lost too many important cards to remain competitive. Aside from some potentially replaceable 1-drops, the biggest losses were definitely Resolute Reinforcements and Knight-Errant of Eos, along with most of the untapped lands: BRO's painlands and ONE's fastlands, which made the mana base solid and aggressive, despite the Naya tricolor.

Last week Alchemy: Duskmourn arrived on MTG Arena and we tried to predict which cards would be the best and have the highest chance of seeing competitive play. Although it's still been a short time, today we already have some initial feedback on those that have actually been included in the decks, since obviously many are trying them and several lists have already been published with a fair amount of success in the ranked ladder of the format. Will the cards that we rated as the best prove to be up to expectations? Let's find out right away, analyzing the strongest and most interesting decks that contain the new cards from Alchemy: Duskmourn!

Alchemy: Duskmourn just released on MTG Arena and it's time to take a look at what's exciting for the Alchemy format! Like its predecessors, this mini set also consists of only 30 cards, divided into: 10 uncommons, 15 rares, and 5 mythics, but of course many of them have been designed for the limited format and only the best will see play in constructed. Today, we’ll try to predict which are these cards, selecting 10 of them and establishing a ranking from worst to best, so as to hype things up and make everything more interesting.

In the last period, the rotation has brought a breath of fresh air into Al, allowing the meta to find viable alternatives to Grixis Heist. The deck we will talk about today has some cards that use the heist mechanics, but unlike many other lists, the mechanics are not fundamental to win matches. The deck is a classic Midrange that makes special use of the possibility to revive creatures from the graveyard.    

Alchemy metagame has undergone several important changes in recent months. Just a few months ago, the meta seemed divided between Naya Midrange, Esper Control, and Naya Convoke. Then, with the release of Outlaws of Thunder Junction and its related alchemy set, Heist took over, polarizing completely the meta around Grixis Heist and leaving (at least in Bo1) additional space only for Naya Convoke. The last two alchemy sets (before the rotation) had, unfortunately, gradually removed from the meta also the various versions of Monored Aggro (the one with Fiery Inscription remained, however, the most popular), eliminating completely aggro/burn alternatives in the format (except for Naya Convoke as an aggro alternative). In such a polarized meta, it seemed absurd not to proceed with some nerf as repeatedly suggested by the community. In fact, from the very beginning, the situation in alchemy seemed quite serious and many people thought that the arrival of a ban or nerf was practically obvious. Then, on the 24th of June, WOTC announced that: "Alchemy's top-end metagame is looking more varied than it has in a while, with the Heist deck as a new entrant to challenge perennial stalwarts like Mono-Red and Mono-Black." A bolt from the blue for all the players of Alchemy, all unchanged and for reasons that in reality were not supported by any data. Mono-Black was a deck that didn't exist in the meta and Mono-Red had practically disappeared from the radar because of Heist. However, in retrospect, among the various statements of WOTC regarding the format, one turned out to be true after the rotation: "With rotation coming in about a month, Alchemy isn't in need of any action." In fact, at the moment, the various decks that are based on the Heist mechanics are strong but not oppressive as just a month ago. Heist vs Mono-Red pre-rotation: an awful matchup The pre-rotation Mono-Red was a very different deck from today's one in both composition and gameplay. The previous version was mainly focused on using Fiery Inscription to quickly close games. The main problem of the matchup with Heist was the high presence of removal spells by Mono-Red: the removal became the number one target for the Heist lists as they gave them time to survive the first stages of aggression of the opponent and get to the most advanced stages of the game while maintaining high enough life points. The old Mono-Red lists, in fact, played over 10 removal spells among Shock, Melt Through, and Lightning Strike, and creatures with constitution low enough to allow these removalspells to always (or almost) kill the target. At the same time, thanks to Impetuous Lootmonger, Heist had time to generate treasure tokens in order to later cast Triumphant Getaway and generate enough lives to win the game.

A couple of months ago we were here wondering the heist mechanic would be too strong in post-rotation Alchemy and if they would nerf it. With the release of Alchemy Bloomburrow we can say we have received the first answers, as WotC seems to have compensated for the power of this ability with new cards that are equally powerful, releasing a set that also, especially thanks to the tribal factor of Bloomburrow, has an above-average amount of playables. But which are the best ones? After a week, for a format not excessively played like Alchemy, we are still in an experimental phase and it's still early to identify exactly what is impacting the meta the most, but of course there are already several brews online, as well as cards that are objectively strong and with high potential.

Here we are! Bloomburrow will arrive on MTG Arena in a few days, precisely on July 30th, and with it there will be a rotation of both Standard and Alchemy formats. As for the evolution of Standard there is already an article by Damienf16 here, while today I will cover the Alchemy part and in particular we'll analyze it through 5 decks that will survive rotation. The latter hits the format like a truck, especially considering that here it's shorter and only has 2 years of expansions, unlike the 3 of Standard. In addition, the extra Alchemy sets also leave us, together with the one that is certainly the most important of all, The Lord of the Rings, bringing back the power level closer to Standard than to Historic.