MTG Arena Is Retiring Alchemy: Dates and What You Keep

Alchemy has been on MTG Arena for nearly five years — Alchemy: Innistrad landed on December 9, 2021. It now has an end date. On September 11, 2026, MTG Arena's Dave Finseth published the State of the Formats 2026 article, and the headline sits in a single line before the article even gets going: "With the next Standard rotation in early 2027, we're retiring the Alchemy format."

That is not a rebalance or a queue consolidation. The format is being removed from the client. What follows is the part the announcement is genuinely useful about — a three-stage timeline, an explicit ruling on what happens to the cards you already own, and one change that lands eleven days after the announcement and will hit far more players than the shutdown itself.

What Wizards announced

Three things, in the order they affect you:

1. Alchemy is being removed from MTG Arena on February 2, 2027. That covers "Alchemy Play, Alchemy Ladder, Alchemy Constructed, Alchemy Direct Challenge, and the Best-of-Three versions of these events," in Wizards' own enumeration.
2. Every rebalanced version of a tabletop card is being reverted on September 22, 2026 — "across all formats," not just Alchemy. Five cards get banned in Historic and one in Brawl the same day because of it.
3. Digital-only Alchemy cards are staying. They keep working, and they stay legal in Historic, Timeless, Brawl and Competitive Brawl.

If you have never touched Alchemy, point 2 is still your problem. It changes Historic and Brawl.

The three dates that matter

Note the shape of that: the card changes come first and the format removal comes last. You have just over four months of Alchemy left after the cards inside it stop being the cards you remember.

September 22: the rebalanced cards go back to paper

This is the change with the widest blast radius of the three above: Wizards applies it "across all formats," where the other two land on Alchemy alone. And it is sitting underneath a format-retirement headline.

Since 2021, Arena has maintained separate, nerfed or buffed versions of certain paper cards — the ones with the A- prefix. Historic, Brawl and Alchemy used the rebalanced version; Timeless used the paper original. That split is ending. Wizards' wording: "On September 22, over 200 rebalanced versions of tabletop Magic cards will be reverted to their original printings across all formats. Those cards will match their tabletop versions in all formats where they are legal."

Scryfall's database gives a firmer number than "over 200." A search for is:rebalanced game:arena with unique cards returns 216 rebalanced cards as of September 12, 2026. Every one of them is a card whose Arena text is about to change or disappear.

The practical translation: if you play Historic or Brawl, decks built around a rebalanced card are about to be playing a different card. Some of those get better — Wizards says "many of these cards are significantly more powerful after being reverted," which is exactly why the ban list moved on the same day.

The bans that ship with the revert

Six entries across two formats, and that is the complete list Wizards published:

The reasoning Wizards gives is specific enough to be worth reading rather than summarising away. Galvanic Discharge and Guide of Souls go because "Boros Energy has been a power outlier in the format since its inception" and its prominence in Timeless made Wizards unwilling to let it run in Historic too. Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord goes as a combo enabler — Wizards describes preferring to kick Sorin out rather than "acting on Vein Ripper, Saint Elenda, or the next powerful Vampire." The One Ring goes because, without its rebalanced version, Wizards expects it "would likely become an auto-include card in most Historic decks."

Nadu, Winged Wisdom is the one card that appears on both lists in the table above. For Brawl, Wizards is blunt about the reason: it does not "believe the tabletop version of Nadu would be fun or fair to play against at any tier."

One card is explicitly not being banned, and it is worth knowing because it is the obvious next candidate: Orcish Bowmasters stays legal in Historic. Wizards says it is "choosing not to ban the tabletop-accurate version of Orcish Bowmasters at this time," and that "in time, this card might prove to be too much." Treat that as a card on notice, not a card that is safe.

What happens to the Alchemy cards you own

The announcement's clearest sentence, and the one that settles the collection question: "Digital-only Alchemy cards will remain on MTG Arena and legal in Historic, Timeless, Brawl, and Competitive Brawl."

So nothing is deleted from your collection, and nothing you crafted becomes a dead card in every format at once. What ends is the Alchemy queue itself and the pool that queue used.

How many cards is that? Scryfall's count of cards from Alchemy-type sets that exist in no paper printing at all and are not rebalanced versions of an existing card — st:alchemy -is:rebalanced -in:paper — comes back at 713 on September 12, 2026. That is the body of work that survives the format's removal. The shape of it matches Wizards' description of the cadence — "an additional 30-card, digital-only release alongside each Magic Multiverse set" — at 25 to 30 cards per Alchemy set across 16 of them, 58 from the first one (Alchemy: Innistrad), and 185 Arena-exclusive cards from the outlier, Alchemy Horizons: Baldur's Gate.

One gotcha if you run this query yourself: swapping -in:paper for -game:paper returns 966 instead, and the extra 253 are not digital-only cards. game:paper tests the printing in front of you, and every Alchemy-set printing is Arena-only — so it lets through cards like Ancestral Recall, Alaundo the Seer and Ancient Gold Dragon that have perfectly ordinary paper printings elsewhere. in:paper tests the card across all its printings, which is the question you actually mean.

Two caveats Wizards attaches to it, both worth taking literally. First, these cards remain management targets: "We may choose to ban or rebalance digital-only Alchemy cards in the future as we manage the formats they are a part of." Staying legal today is not a promise about next year. Second, nothing in the announcement offers wildcards, gems, gold or any other compensation for cards crafted for Alchemy. If you are hoping for a refund window, the article does not describe one.

The other thing happening on February 2

Alchemy's removal is scheduled to land on the same day as the 2027 Standard rotation, "alongside Nauctis: The Sunken Realm Prerelease events." That is the first Standard rotation since 2025 — Wizards' Aligning the Universes announcement states plainly that "there will be no rotation in 2026 as we gear up for this change," with rotation moving to "coincide with the first set of the calendar year starting in 2027."

Wizards has not published a per-set rotation list for 2027, so treat what follows as derived rather than quoted. The official Standard page states the rule — "Once per year, after the first premier set Prerelease of the year, the six oldest sets in Standard rotate out" — and publishes the current legal-set list. The six oldest entries on that list, with Scryfall's paper release dates, are:

Two things make that list hold together rather than being a guess. Wizards' own note in Aligning the Universes says "Bloomburrow and Duskmourn: House of Horror will both be legal for slightly shorter than originally anticipated" — which only makes sense if both are in the 2027 batch, and that in turn requires Outlaws of Thunder Junction and The Big Score to count as one entry, exactly as the official Standard page lists them. And Foundations, which released November 15, 2024 and is therefore the seventh-oldest set, is not in the batch because Wizards committed at announcement that it "is a Standard-legal set and will remain in Standard until at least 2029."

Wizards has not published the Nauctis Prerelease dates. For comparison, Reality Fracture's Prerelease events run September 25 to October 1 ahead of an October 2 release, so the rotation trigger sits in the week before a set's launch rather than on launch day.

Why Wizards says it is doing this

Finseth lays out the three problems Alchemy was built in 2021 to solve, and argues each one has since been solved elsewhere:

• Non-Standard content needed a home. Historic existed, but its power level meant "only the strongest of those cards would see play," and Brawl "was not as popular as it is today." Arena now has several nonrotating formats for cards outside Standard.
• Players wanted more cards. Arena had "four or so releases per year" in 2021, and a 30-card digital-only release per set filled the gap. Arena now ships far more sets per year.
• Constructed formats changed too slowly. Alchemy was the experiment in matching digital metagame speed, via frequent rebalancing, a separate banned list and a two-year rotation instead of three.

The conclusion Wizards draws: "With these problems no longer pressing, Alchemy's role has become less clear. So, we want to focus our attention on delivering new sets and our growing formats like Brawl."

The numbers in the same article back the Brawl half of that. Standard is "around 50%" of Arena Constructed play. Competitive Brawl, which did not exist two years ago, is now "just under ten percent of all queue matches played on MTG Arena." Alchemy gets no play-rate figure anywhere in the article, and it is not one of the seven formats plotted on the article's own queue-play chart either — that chart tracks Standard, Historic, Brawl, Competitive Brawl, Pioneer, Timeless and Standard Brawl.

Quick Action Checklist

• Before September 22, 2026: check any Historic or Brawl deck for rebalanced A- cards. Their text changes that day, in every format.
• Do not craft into the five Historic bans — Galvanic Discharge, Guide of Souls, Nadu Winged Wisdom, Sorin Imperious Bloodlord, The One Ring — or into Nadu for Brawl.
• Orcish Bowmasters is legal but flagged by Wizards as a card that "might prove to be too much" later. Craft with that in mind.
• You do not need to dump Alchemy cards. Digital-only Alchemy cards stay legal in Historic, Timeless, Brawl and Competitive Brawl.
• No compensation was announced. Nothing in the September 11 article offers wildcards or refunds for Alchemy crafting.
• Alchemy: Reality Fracture on October 13, 2026 is the last one. If you want the format's send-off events, that is the window.
• February 2, 2027 is a double event — Alchemy removal and the first Standard rotation since 2025. Plan Standard and Brawl crafting around one date, not two.
• Re-check legality before you craft anything expensive. Digital format lists move faster than articles do, this one included.