#Alchemy Precon

[beatsandskies]

Saddle up and enter the precon Arena: a big festival or a crime?

The illustration I’ve used as a preview is most definitely a crime. My “sensible” plan B was just the OTJ plains: Plains by Sergey Glushakov So I finally decided to give Arena a crack recently. A big part of what I dig about Magic is The Gathering, so digital play isn’t something which is a high priority. But at the same time I like Precons and it’s clear Arena is where all the 60 card action…

[wielderofmysteries]

It's day 1 of me doing ~whatever this is~, and I do want to put it on the record that as of point in time, July 28th 2023, 8 and a half years after the introduction of the first trans character in Magic, there are now 10+ named canon transgender characters across Magic cards, stories, and other media, and not a single one of them is a trans man. There are ZERO named trans male characters in the Magic IP.

The only canon named trans man across all of Magic is Klement, a character created for the Baldur's Gate Alchemy set on MTG Arena. And he doesn't exist in the Magic Multiverse because he's a D&D franchise character. And he's a digital-only card so his card doesn't really exist either. There's no paper print. You can't own a Klement card. A trans guy who sees himself in Klement and would like to use him as a Commander cannot do that.

The only time a trans man has appeared on a non-Secret Lair Magic card is Death-Greeter's Champion, who got printed earlier this year in a March of the Machine Commander precon deck. He doesn't have a name. In a Commander set, where Legends matter and they can introduce new Legends for alternate Commanders, they wouldn't do it. They wouldn't give a trans man character a name.

Don't get it twisted. There is no grand conspiracy or anything like that. I believe there is only good intention behind the scenes. The people who make Magic are wonderful people and many of them are queer as well. They want to make cards that represent themselves and also for the Magic fanbase, which has such a high proportion of trans fans.

But IDK, like. All this to say that it feels so shitty as a trans man to see Magic broadly embracing trans identities and still denying this entire section of the community. It feels shitty and it just doesn't make any sense to me. Other trans fans of Magic get representation. We don't even get names.

[sdyuteiaok]

Ok, no draft today--super tired anyway--cuz we had the Alchemy precon Midweek Magic event, which is an excellent change of pace. However wacky Frogs are in draft, the Alchemy version is that just to eleven time a hundred with all the card modification and stuff so you're just bouncing and conjuring duplicates of altered cards and whatever, it can seriously lead to quite the decision paralysis as you try to optimize all these card alterations and on top of that get the sequencing right for the best results, often which are overkill, but still, it's annoying getting something wrong or even just sub-optimal. And then in political news, got some people registered and engaged in today's phone bank, which was great, and then today's speakers were wonderful, including Doug's story of his family coming together with Kamala's, and then of course the Obamas both delivered cathartic and moving speeches themselves. Just wonderful. I particularly like how they emphasized that despite the energy and enthusiasm, it's not going to be easy and we both need to make it not close so they can't mess with or make murky the results and that we also need to deliver the Senate and House in order for things to really get rolling with Kamala. I do fear people are taking the energy for granted and that they aren't also paying attention to the crucial need to take Congress, and again, at decent enough margins such that all the incessant hindrances and caltrops are at long last no longer such a gigantic weight on progress. Ideally we can finally get rid of the stupid filibuster, in particular, but again, we need serious numbers for that to happen. I don't want to hear from idiots acting like Kamala has a magic wand to do whatever she wants without Congress, and that Congress similarly has a magic wand without numbers and with no obstructionism either in office or in policy/rules.

[pikachugirltits]

Update Notes:

Wasn't expecting to make another update so soon, but this is a big one!

Added Yuma, Magic lore's first named canonical trans man! Seeing as how we already know he's the face of one of the Commander precons I just added him to the "Characters with cards" section and used his artwork from the story as a placeholder. Included a link to the story as well.

Added Elnor and Shadress from Yuma's story to the "Story only characters" section. It's easy to miss but the narration calls Shadress "her girlfriend" when Yuma is describing how he knew Elnor.

Added Klement from Alchemy Horizons: Baldur's Gate to the D&D section. I had been hearing for a while he was a trans man (which means he slightly edges out Yuma as "first trans man on a Magic card") but finally managed to track down proof! He's Arena only, but that's still technically a (digital) Magic card.

Added Halsin to the D&D section as well. He was missing from the original Twitter thread on queer characters in Battle for Baldur's Gate despite being a romancable NPC from Baldur's Gate 3 and having a card in the set. I'm wondering if the ability to romance Halsin wasn't a later addition and the build that WotC had to base the cards on didn't have it. Still, that makes him pansexual like all the other romancable Baldur's Gate 3 characters.

I also cleaned up the D&D section to be consistent with the other sections, and created an Appendix for the screenshots of the Twitter posts talking about the Battle for Baldur's Gate characters and Klement.

Tiny change, but added surnames to the characters who have them.

Look at what I've been working on! It's a list of every single queer characters in Magic the Gathering!

It originally started out as just a list of characters from Magic's lore, both ones with cards and a small list of the named characters who have appeared in the stories but don't have cards. I mostly focused on characters that are unambiguously and canonically queer...so no Xantcha or Karn nor did I include any of the aetherborn. I plan to eventually update the story only characters section with links to whatever online stories they appear in.

But I thought why stop there? I used the Wayback Machine to dig up the old Twitter thread talking about all the queer characters from Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate and screenshot it for posterity. By then, I was on a role, so I continued with the Universes Beyond characters.

For that, I delved into wikis to try and dig up as much as I could, especially for IP I'm not familiar with, like Fallout or Transformers (which I specifically used the IDW continuity for because that's the one I'm familiar with others talking about.) I generally included labels whenever I knew for certain what they were, and did try and double check wiki pages to make sure. The Baldur's Gate characters who can be romanced regardless of gender were labeled pansexual in the D&D section so I used that as the label for romancable Fallout characters that can be romanced by any gender.

Let me know what you think, and if there's a character I missed in any section just let me know so I can update the list! I plan to keep this updated over time as new characters get added.

[radramblog]

alchemy is a dumb name for a format

There seems to be increasingly little discussion in Magic: The Gathering circles that isn’t just some form of bitching about things that really don’t actually matter, which is a frustrating factoid that I’m tired of having to slog through. I mean, the reddits and twitters of the world will always be as they are, but it would be nice if I could stop having to carefully curate my feed in other places to stymie the influx of nerd rage. I do play Magic because, you know, it’s fun, and presumably, so do all these people.

There is a very deliberate reason I try to keep a tone of at worst concernedness on this blog when I’m talking about the game, even when I’m discussing things about it I don’t like, because I’m sure there’s enough horseshit already out there. The Absolute State of Magic discourse is, and has been for a long while, completely awful.

Anyway so there are new digital-only cards, and people are pissy about it. Again.

I suppose I have the luxury of not really being an Arena player on this one. Even in my pretty limited experience I’ve mostly played drafts, so I don’t really have the same stake that the “Magic Community” holds in the effects of Alchemy as a…format? Set? How exactly does this work? And…doesn’t Arena have enough silly formats? Like this thing still has Historic and Historic Brawl and half a dozen just-for-fun draft formats but lacks things like Modern, Commander or hell, even Pioneer. How much would Pioneer even take? I mean, sure, there’s like 16 full sets of cards between Arena and Pioneer, but you don’t need to add all of those cards.

I think there’s two main issues with Alchemy in general. Well, two main ones and one personal one.

The first Big Issue is the confusion it presents. Alchemy appears to be Standard, but with some cards rebalanced and some digital-only cards added. So far, 30 (?) cards have been revealed for the format to be added when it launches later this week, as well as 11 rebalanced cards already in Standard, and while they have gone out of their way to make it clear which cards are which and very clearly delineate what a rebalanced card looks like, there’s still going to be a level of confusion for players, especially those who go between Alchemy and regular formats- which, considering the nature of Arena, is going to be most people who play it. There are people who are going to activate Alchemy!Faceless Haven, forget it’s a 3/3 instead of a 4/3, and have it either not kill the creature it was going to on blocks or just miss lethal and lose the game that way.

(clearly I'm out of touch with Standard, because I thought the “only get birds if this was foretold” part was already part of the card.)

This is to say nothing of newer players. Magic is a game that already requires a ton of onboarding, with the intricate mechanics and interactions, things like priority (which is handled by Arena itself, to be fair), and the subtle differences between cards that already exist- e.g. whether or not a burn spell can go face or not (the latter being surprisingly common these days). Adding on this extra, slightly different format with a pile of new cards and making some of their other cards different is an extra layer of what.

(God okay no fucking proxy this in all your goddamn cubes this one is heat)

My other main concern is how this is going to contribute to the infinite spoiler season that is Magic today. Standard sets now already come with a set of regular cards, two or three (or more!) forms of Showcase frames, usually associated Commander precons, cards that are “for Commander” but only show up in Set Boosters or Collector Boosters, and assorted promos for things like FNM. This adds even more Stuff to every single set release, that drowns out discussions about other Magic topics, and keeps people having to pay attention to the new shiny thing when they haven’t even been able to properly get a hold of the last set of shiny things.

My personal concern, for what it’s worth, relates to non-rotating formats on Arena…and by that I actually mostly mean Arena Cube. My issue with Arena Cubes past is that due to being made almost entirely of Standard cards from the last few years, they’re basically just midrange power piles with not a lot of depth to the deckbuilding stage beyond “play the best cards in the colours you ended up in as long as you have a curve”, and that leads to a lot of samey matches. I’d like the focus of Arena Cubes to lean towards making them more like real, paper Cubes in their gameplay and variety, but I suppose WoTC has ironically never been the best at designing them in the first place- and I say that as a Legendary Cube apologist.

It also does beg the question of…what will other Arena formats like Historic (and Historic Brawl, and Cubes) do about the new and rebalanced cards? Historic already has a variety of digital-only cards from Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, but how about the rebalances? It would be utterly bizarre for one to be allowed and not the other, but that would mean taking an axe to a lot of the cards Historic players love. Some of those rebalance changes are…questionable.

Magic at least doesn’t have the issue Hearthstone had to get yelled at for years to solve, which was un-nerfing cards once they were no longer relevant. It wouldn’t shock me if all the rebalances were undid once they rotate out of Standard/Alchemy, though that would make them again weird in Historic. But Magic’s never had the ability to do nerfs before, owing to the fact that the cards are, you know, physical. So this presents a whole new axis for the game to work within, and one which people don’t really appreciate.

There are upsides to this, of course. I actually like a lot of the balance shifts, with the knowledge that these are designed tweaks for standard play- honestly, like, all of them make sense to me aside from Luminarch Aspirant (was that card really that good?), and I’m interested to see how these altered cards play out long-term. And there are, of course, all the new cards, with a pile of weirdo mechanics that feel very “we wish we could have done this for a long time”. Expedition Supplier is basically a nu-Arena style version of a custom card design I saw years ago, and I love it- not to mention the new Gitrog and Ishkanah (the latter of which I wish was Commander legal). There’s a bunch of interesting stuff for a bunch of interesting archetypes (though nothing new, is going to pop up, I think?), and im sure the format is going to play really well.

Alchemy’s got the whole community rioting like it’s the end of days, though I’m pretty sure that’s just because they Know No Other Way. I am, as usual, going to hold my judgment until we see more and/or see how the format plays and is supported. Just don’t expect people to take to it immediately.

[the-burnished-hart]

EDH Recap

A few members of the Recap team and I played EDH on Cockatrice tonight. Chelsea (@chelsea-beleren-vess​) wanted to test out her new Atraxa, Praetor’s Voice deck, so she uploaded the precon list and switched out a few cards for planeswalkers and Doubling Season. Connor (@crooked-tongue)​ ran Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer with a bunch of artifacts, while Colin (@delver-of-seacrest​) also opted for a Red-White deck, playing Dwarf and Vehicle Tribal with Depala, Pilot Exemplar at the helm. I decided to run my try-hard combo list: Phenax Dredge Combo, led by Phenax, God of Deception, of course.

A target was immediately placed on my head when I ran out a t2 Mesmeric Orb. With Connor stuck with only one land for the longest time, Chelsea and Colin spent no time attacking me and whittling down my life total. I was at 7 life before I was able to achieve the soft lock combo with Mnemonic Wall and Evacuation, casting it every time someone tried to attack me.

After a couple turns of effectively wiping the board, I went for the win by Entombing Laboratory Maniac and returning it to my hand with Grim Harvest at the end of Chelsea’s turn. After casting the Lab Maniac on my turn, I realized I had messed up---when I had cast Forbidden Alchemy a while back, I ended up putting a Necrotic Ooze in my hand and and the rest on the BOTTOM OF MY LIBRARY instead of in my graveyard. One of those cards sent to the bottom was Mirror-Mad Phantasm: with the Phantasm in my graveyard and the Ooze on the battlefield, I could have activated the shuffle ability with my Ooze and mill my entire library into my graveyard, and then with a Flashbacked Deep Analysis, I would have won the game off Lab Maniac’s replacement effect.

When I realized my mistake, I laughed at myself and scooped. I probably could have kept up the soft lock with Evacuation and won on a subsequent turn, but my dad was calling me to go downstairs and make dinner anyway, so I didn’t really mind calling it quits. Chelsea ended up taking the game after I left with a huge Atraxa and Duelist’s Heritage, giving her commander double strike and allowing her to kill both Connor and Colin in one hit each.

[beatsandskies]

deePRECONnaissance: our only Bloomburrow precon event is going to be Alchemy?

I’m actually working on more real content but getting it out today would have been tough: fortunately there’s Mid Week Magic decklists to the rescue! This time, the event is to tie in with the release of Bloomburrow’s alchemy cards. Not my favourite part of Arena by any metric, but hey: I’ll give it a go for the day or two it’s available. I should probably explain the preview image and summary…

[sdyuteiaok]

Just taking it a little easier today and played the last few minutes of the MWM Alchemy precon event. But I also glanced at a deck I'd been building, and ended up getting it into playable shape so I gave it a few test runs--a UB Mindlink Mech deck, this time utilizing the 3/3 graveyard nibbling werewolf, as well as the Westgate Regent, and the UB mill card stealer specter, supported with lots of discard to clear the way for some stress-free attacks. It's still not quite up to snuff, but I feel like it could get in the ballpark. I love the vehicle, and I'd probably do better if I just got it to Bo3, since Bo1 is so coin-flippy as to whether or not you're going to have a real game.

[sdyuteiaok]

I do have to hand it to the alchemy precon event, the GW saddle deck is quite fast, at least, so we can wrap sessions pretty quickly. I've won on turn two or three multiple times. The killer blow is definitely the GW Angel-maker Horse into the 4/2 legend vigilance tap-drawer.

[sdyuteiaok]

The Alchemy precon event is another enjoyable one, like the Ravnica Clue one was--nice in small doses--the saddle deck is what I've been playing exclusively and it's enjoyable sorta mixing and matching the different Mounts and letting them all have their time in the spotlight and also seeing them build off of each other with neat little synergies and various routes that you can take. It's a little clunky sometimes, but not enough to be a drag on the event--like you kinda want to be attacking with the 4/2 vigilance legend, but it's also excellent at saddling your guys, too, and the extra card always is nice. And the GW flyer is also deceptively strong--you never really think too much of it, and then it just clobbers, especially with the brushwagg's counter boosting assist.

[sdyuteiaok]

Ugh, 1-3'd an Alchemy draft, my first draft in a while. We were mainly black (so I was definitely nervous, since it's the worst color in the set, but I hoped the Alchemy cards might give it a boost), and managed to sidle into white as my second color. I didn't ever get to use my BW spirit swapper Alchemy card, but I know it can be brutal from the precon deck. I was interested to see if the 2/1 Alchemy rats were any good and they felt pretty mediocre. But as uncommon Alchemy cards, there's a pedigree of these cards being ridiculous when you actually play them, as opposed to just reading them, but these didn't really feel great. I figured they can give fast starts (and my one win did start with two of these guys going to town), and then late force morphs or trades, and then even be fodder for my sac a guy exile a guy guy (played two of three, planning to loop them with my BW spirit swapper), but it never came together--it was apparently illegal to draw both parts of the deck, just one or the other. In any case, the deck could rarely ever pick up a second black source, which cost me a couple games for sure, so all in all, a bit of a depressing outing. I'm down to try again, but I'm not enchanted by this format.