MTG Arena Formats Guide: Alchemy, Historic, Timeless

Paper formats come with tidy one-line pitches. Standard is the last few sets. Modern is 2003 onward. Commander is the one with the 100-card decks and the arguments. Arena's three digital-only constructed formats get no such courtesy, and "like Standard but online" does not survive contact with any of them.

Here is the actual shape of them, first checked against Scryfall's legality data and Wizards' own format and banned-restricted pages on 15 August 2026. The headline: Historic bans 84 cards that Timeless is happy to let you play, and Alchemy's legal card pool is smaller than the Standard pool it is built on top of. Neither of those is intuitive, and both change what you should be spending wildcards on.

Updated 26 October 2026: two things changed after this guide was first written. Wizards' State of the Formats 2026 article (11 September 2026) announced that every rebalanced A- version of a tabletop card would revert to its original printing across all formats on 22 September 2026, and that the Alchemy format will be removed from MTG Arena on 2 February 2027. The rebalancing sections below are rewritten to match, and the ban counts and card-pool numbers were re-pulled from Scryfall on 26 October 2026. Our Alchemy retirement explainer has the full timeline.

What digital-only actually means on Arena

Two separate things get lumped under "digital-only," and keeping them apart makes the rest of this straightforward.

Designed-for-digital cards are cards that only exist on Arena because they could not work on cardboard. They lean on randomness, on cards generated from outside your deck, and on tracking hidden information — things a human playgroup cannot referee. The mechanic list Wizards has shipped includes Boon, Conjure, Double team, Draft, Heist, Incorporate, Intensity, Perpetually, Seek, Specialize and Spellbook, plus the Chorus card subtype. They are not a fringe experiment either: on Scryfall on 26 October 2026, 244 digital cards use perpetually, 182 use conjure, 110 use seek, and 19 use specialize.

Perpetually is the one that best explains why these cannot be printed. A perpetual effect changes a card for the rest of the game across every zone — if a card gets +1/+1 perpetually and then gets shuffled back into your library, it is still bigger when you draw it again. Paper Magic has no way to track that without sticky notes and trust.

Rebalanced cards were the second thing, and they were a completely different animal: existing paper cards whose Arena versions had been tuned up or down for digital play, shown with an "A-" prefix on the name and an Arena "A" stamp on the card. Scryfall listed 216 of them when this guide was first checked in August 2026. On 22 September 2026 Wizards reverted every one of them to its original paper printing across all formats, and Scryfall's is:rebalanced search returned zero cards on 26 October 2026.

For almost five years the thing that tripped people up was that a rebalanced card and its paper original were separate cards with separate legalities. That split is gone. What still separates the three formats is their card pools and their ban lists, which is most of what follows.

Alchemy: Standard with a shorter memory

Alchemy launched in December 2021 as a digital-first, fast-moving format. The pitch was simple: take the Standard card pool, add designed-for-digital cards, and rebalance things freely so the metagame never sits still. Each Premier set got an adjacent Alchemy set of roughly 30 cards, landing in the weeks following the paper set — usually two to three.

Alchemy is now on its way out. Wizards' State of the Formats 2026 article says the format will be removed from MTG Arena on 2 February 2027, alongside the 2027 Standard rotation, and names Alchemy: Reality Fracture (released 13 October 2026) as the last Alchemy release planned for Arena. Digital-only Alchemy cards stay on Arena and remain legal in Historic, Timeless, Brawl and Competitive Brawl.

Best-of-one and best-of-three, ranked and unranked. Standard's deckbuilding rules apply — 60-card minimum, four copies max.

Now the counterintuitive part. Alchemy is built on Standard and adds cards to it, so you would expect its pool to be bigger. It is not. On 26 October 2026 Scryfall lists 5,164 cards legal in Standard and 4,223 legal in Alchemy — 1,299 cards are Standard-legal but Alchemy-illegal, while only 358 go the other way.

Most of the gap is rotation. In May 2023 Wizards moved Standard to a three-year rotation but kept Alchemy on a two-year rotation, starting with Wilds of Eldraine. So an entire year of sets sits in Standard while having already rotated out of Alchemy. Right now that gap covers Wilds of Eldraine, The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, Murders at Karlov Manor and Outlaws of Thunder Junction — nearly all of their cards are legal in Standard but not in Alchemy (Scryfall shows only 27 cards from those four sets, mostly reprints and basic lands, legal in both). Most of the remainder is Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit, whose cards Scryfall lists on 26 October 2026 as legal in Standard but not in Alchemy.

If you build Alchemy decks off a Standard list you saw somewhere, check every card. A quarter of Standard is not there.

Cards that rotate out of Alchemy are not destroyed — they fall through into Historic, which is where this gets interesting.

Historic: the eternal format that stopped being eternal

Historic was supposed to be Arena's eternal format: never rotates, play your whole collection. Minimum 60 cards, up to 15 sideboard cards in best-of-three (seven in best-of-one), four copies maximum.

It did not stay that. As Arena started absorbing paper products that were never balanced for a 60-card digital ladder — bonus sheets, The List, straight-to-Modern sets — Wizards began banning cards pre-emptively, before anyone had cast them in anger. The clearest example is the Khans of Tarkir fetch lands. Flooded Strand, Polluted Delta, Bloodstained Mire, Wooded Foothills and Windswept Heath are all banned in Historic and all legal in Modern, a considerably more powerful paper format.

Scryfall puts Historic's banned list at 84 cards on 26 October 2026, up from 77 when this guide was first checked in August. The additions include five cards Wizards banned on 22 September 2026, the day of the rebalance revert (Galvanic Discharge; Guide of Souls; Nadu, Winged Wisdom; Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord; and The One Ring), plus Mind Twist and Eye of Ugin, which Wizards pre-banned in its 14 September 2026 Arena announcement. That is not a light touch. Historic is best understood not as "everything on Arena" but as a heavily curated digital format that happens not to rotate — which is exactly why Wizards eventually built a second one.

If you check Wizards' own banned-and-restricted page instead, it shows 77 Historic bans: it does not list announced pre-bans such as Mind Twist and Eye of Ugin, and it still shows Orcish Bowmasters, which the State of the Formats 2026 article says Wizards chose not to ban after the revert.

Historic is also where rotated Alchemy cards go to live permanently, and Wizards says digital-only Alchemy cards stay legal there after Alchemy itself is removed. Since 22 September 2026 it plays the original paper printings of tabletop cards, not rebalanced A- versions.

Timeless: a restricted list instead of a banlist

Timeless was announced on 4 December 2023 and went live on 12 December 2023, built on a deliberately different philosophy: instead of banning problem cards, restrict them, the way Vintage does.

Timeless has zero banned cards. It has exactly four restricted ones — Channel, Demonic Tutor, Necropotence and Tibalt's Trickery — and "restricted" means one copy total across your maindeck and sideboard combined. Three of those four (Channel, Demonic Tutor, Necropotence) are also restricted in paper Vintage, which tells you how seriously the format takes them. Tibalt's Trickery is the odd one out: it is fully legal in Vintage and restricted here.

The comparison that makes the whole format click: every one of the 84 cards Scryfall lists as banned in Historic is playable in Timeless. Four of them only as a single restricted copy, but playable. Fetch lands, Brainstorm, Chrome Mox, Ancient Tomb, Blood Moon — all live.

Deckbuilding is standard constructed: 60-card minimum, four copies max, 15-card sideboard for best-of-three. Ranked best-of-one, traditional best-of-three, and an unranked queue.

One caveat worth stating plainly, because Wizards' own announcement pitched Timeless as containing "every card on MTG Arena": that is not literally true. Some cards are programmed into Arena but cannot be crafted, and those are not legal. Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall are both unplayable in Historic and Timeless despite existing in Arena's code. Timeless is every craftable Arena card, which is a meaningfully different claim.

The rebalance rule, and why it ended

Until September 2026 this was the single most useful thing to internalise: Historic and Alchemy used the rebalanced A- versions of paper cards, while Timeless used the original paper printings. When this guide was first checked, none of Scryfall's 216 rebalanced cards was legal in Timeless.

That rule no longer exists. Wizards' State of the Formats 2026 article announced that on 22 September 2026 over 200 rebalanced versions of tabletop cards would be "reverted to their original printings across all formats," and Scryfall's is:rebalanced search returned zero cards on 26 October 2026. A paper card now has one text on Arena, in every format where it is legal. Wizards banned five cards in Historic and Nadu, Winged Wisdom in Brawl on the same day, and chose not to ban the tabletop version of Orcish Bowmasters in Historic. Digital-only Alchemy cards were not part of the revert, and Wizards says it may still ban or rebalance them.

Cori-Steel Cutter shows what changed. It is banned in Standard and banned in Pioneer. Until 22 September, Historic and Alchemy players got A-Cori-Steel Cutter, a toned-down version, while Timeless played the original. The A- version is gone now, and on 26 October 2026 Scryfall lists the original Cori-Steel Cutter as legal in both Historic and Timeless.

Alchemy's ban list is where the sources currently disagree. Wizards' banned-and-restricted page still lists four Alchemy bans: Cori-Steel Cutter, Leyline of Resonance, Monstrous Rage and Sewer-veillance Cam. Scryfall's legality data on 26 October 2026 lists only Sewer-veillance Cam as banned in Alchemy, and shows the original Cori-Steel Cutter and Leyline of Resonance as legal there. Wizards' August and October 2026 banned-and-restricted announcements both list "no changes" for Alchemy, so check the in-client deckbuilder before crafting for it.

Practical upshot for your wildcards: a decklist or guide from before 22 September 2026 that names an A- card is describing a card that no longer exists on Arena. Check the current card text and the format's ban list before you spend.

Explorer is gone, and that is fine

If you are returning to Arena after a break and looking for Explorer, stop. Explorer was introduced in 2022 as a placeholder — every Pioneer-legal card that happened to exist on Arena — with Wizards saying from the start that it would eventually be retired and simply called Pioneer.

That happened on 10 May 2025. Explorer became Pioneer on Arena, its ban list was aligned with tabletop Pioneer's rather than maintained separately, Tibalt's Trickery was unbanned in the process, and eleven cards were added to Arena for the first time to close the remaining gaps. Practically, Arena's Pioneer is now the paper format, not an approximation of it. If you want a format that plays identically in paper and on Arena, that is your answer — and our Pioneer format guide covers it as a paper format in full.

There are now no Arena-only "bridge" formats. What remains digital-only, once you set the singleton Brawl queues aside, is Alchemy, Historic and Timeless — and Alchemy only until 2 February 2027.

Which one should you actually queue into

Short version, based on what each format is actually for:

• Play Alchemy if you like a metagame that shifts constantly and you enjoy the digital-only mechanics on their own terms. Understand that it rotates faster than Standard, your Standard list will not port over cleanly, and the format leaves Arena on 2 February 2027.
• Play Historic if you want a non-rotating format at a moderate power level with a heavy referee's hand on it. The 84-card banned list is doing a lot of work to keep the format where Wizards wants it.
• Play Timeless if you want the highest-power constructed experience Arena offers and you want paper cards to behave like paper cards. Fetch lands, free spells, the whole toolbox — with four restricted cards instead of a banlist.

On wildcards: Timeless is the safest long-term investment of the three, because it never rotates and its banned list is currently empty. Alchemy is the riskiest by a distance, because Wizards removes the format from Arena on 2 February 2027. Cards crafted for it are not wasted outright — digital-only Alchemy cards stay legal in Historic, Timeless, Brawl and Competitive Brawl, and paper cards keep whatever legality they have elsewhere — but the queue you crafted them for is going away.

If you came here from Commander and want the singleton commander experience on Arena instead, that is Brawl, which is a different thing again — our Brawl format guide covers Standard Brawl and Historic Brawl. And if the restricted-list concept is what interests you, Timeless borrowed it wholesale from Vintage, covered in our Vintage format guide.

Quick Action Checklist

• Check the format's pool before copying a decklist: on 26 October 2026 Scryfall lists 1,299 Standard-legal cards that are not legal in Alchemy.
• Remember Alchemy rotated on two years while Standard rotates on three — the gap is roughly four sets.
• Do not spend wildcards on cards you only want for Alchemy decks: Wizards removes the Alchemy format from Arena on 2 February 2027.
• Assume nothing about Historic being "eternal." Check its banned list first (84 cards on Scryfall); fetch lands are on it.
• In Timeless, look for the restricted four — Channel, Demonic Tutor, Necropotence, Tibalt's Trickery — and build to one copy each.
• Ignore any decklist that names an A- rebalanced card. Those versions were reverted to their paper printings in every format on 22 September 2026.
• Stop looking for Explorer. It became Pioneer on Arena in May 2025.
• Verify current legality on Scryfall or Wizards' banned-and-restricted list rather than a guide, this one included — digital formats change faster than articles do.