MTG Arena is retiring Alchemy: 200+ rebalanced cards revert on 22 September and Historic gets five bans

Five years after it launched, Alchemy is being switched off. In MTG Arena's State of the Formats update on 11 September, Dave Finseth wrote: "With the next Standard rotation in early 2027, we're retiring the Alchemy format."

The wind-down starts next week, and the first step affects far more players than Alchemy ever did.

The timeline

Date	What changes
22 September 2026	Over 200 rebalanced tabletop cards revert to their printed versions in all formats. New Historic and Brawl bans take effect.
13 October 2026	Alchemy: Reality Fracture releases, the last planned Alchemy set, with sendoff events including a preconstructed event using every past Into the Future deck.
2 February 2027	Alchemy is removed with rotation, alongside Nauctis: The Sunken Realm Prerelease events. That covers Alchemy Play, Ladder, Constructed, Direct Challenge and the Best-of-Three versions.

The bans that come with it

Un-nerfing 200 cards makes several of them much stronger overnight, so the banned lists move on the same day.

• Historic: Galvanic Discharge, Guide of Souls, Nadu, Winged Wisdom, Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord and The One Ring are banned.
• Brawl: Nadu, Winged Wisdom is banned.
• Timeless and Competitive Brawl: no changes.

Wizards made a point of what it is leaving alone: the tabletop-accurate Orcish Bowmasters stays legal in Historic "at this time". A follow-up on 14 September added pre-emptive bans for cards arriving as Reality Fracture Special Guests: Eye of Ugin in Brawl and Historic, and Mind Twist in Historic.

Digital-only cards are not going anywhere. They remain legal in Historic, Timeless, Brawl and Competitive Brawl, and Wizards says it may still ban or rebalance them.

Why Wizards is doing it

Finseth's explanation is that Alchemy was built in 2021 to solve three problems: non-Standard sets needed a home below Historic's power level, Arena only had around four releases a year and players wanted more cards, and Wizards wanted a format that could change as fast as a digital metagame does. None of those is pressing now. Arena has several non-rotating formats, more sets per year, and in Brawl a format that is actually growing.

The numbers in the same article show where players are. Standard makes up nearly 50% of all Constructed queue play, and 93% of ranked Standard games are Best-of-One. Competitive Brawl, a new queue, already accounts for just under ten percent of all queue matches.

What it means

For anyone who plays both paper and Arena, 22 September is the bigger date. Rebalancing meant the card in your Arena deck did not always do what the card in your binder did. After next week it will, in every format.

If you play Historic, check your decks before the 22nd. Five staples leave at once while dozens of others get stronger, so the format that exists on the 23rd is effectively new. The State of the Formats article does not mention wildcard refunds for the banned cards, so we would hold off crafting anything Historic-specific until Wizards clarifies or the new metagame settles.

For Commander players, the Brawl figures are the interesting part. Wizards says it wants to focus on "our growing formats like Brawl", and a new queue already sitting just under a tenth of all matches is why. Our formats guide covers how Brawl differs from paper Commander.

Pioneer players on Arena get something too: Wizards plans one Arena Championship and a few qualifiers featuring the format in 2027.

What happens next

Reality Fracture arrives on Arena on 29 September. The rebalancing reversal and the new bans land a week earlier, on 22 September.