Did you know that some materials confusingly said that each deck only had 8 cards? Like as few as the old Kaldheim decks? Thank god it wasn’t the case, not everyone wants to play with those Archenemy cards.
First off, the 8 new mythics. They finally made them all borderless, all equally respected, all much more colorful than they would have been in that piss yellow frame (it does apply to any color pair not even trio after all). Great thing, I wish they had done it from the beginning of going borderless with these commanders. What I can’t say is great is why are their collectors’ numbers mixed together, like Aminatou is first, followed by the 4 backup commanders, then followed by the 3 other main commanders? Honestly there definitely was weirder ways to come about this that I could totally research in, but honestly I don’t think I have seen this crap for like as long as I do these reviews.
Now onto the 32 new rares. Most obvious thing is that each deck gets 1 room. Not exactly, Aminatou’s deck got 2 rooms, not exactly so that the miracle discount can apply to both halves (you can’t cast both at the same time, may I admit). So surely that adds up to 5 rooms so that they make a monocolored cycle, unlike the Bloomburrow classes? No, there’s two black rooms and no blue rooms! Yes, neither Simic or Esper is interested in one, honestly I was expecting Red for a second. Out of the five, the Red one has both sides costing equal, probably the only Room to be so symmetrical, and the art may reflect that and the two other non-black rooms go for right side being cheaper than the left, at 3 mana each.
Now onto actual color balance, it’s chaos as usual I guess, honestly I wished better knowing there are 3 dual colors decks instead of the usual 1 or 2.
Last time we got oversized cards, it was 10 planes card, 5 new 5 reprint in MOM’s case and 10 new in UB. This time we get somewhere in the middle, 8 new schemes and 2 reprints. Given that these certainly aren’t divided by colors, no talk about colors, maybe eventually I may figure what colors the decks that these reprints came from and came to, that’s a weird sentence but it may adds context.
One thing that I could say is the frame got so so much lamer now. There used to be this big wooden frame with 4 arches holding the 4 corners of the card, which mean sure the art got way less room back then but they were cooler that way and they also matched the card back (which for obvious reasons didn’t change). And I guess also trivia that the old Nickle Balls board game set had this on theme frame for the schemes even though the proportions was total nonsense, that definitely felt more fun. Guess the correct solution would have been to design a frame for each deck themed to its commander, so that also makes sorting them easier if you really do mix them up.
Continuing Outjerked Alchemy’s idea of trying to crossover the other alchemy sets in this mess, this time we see a collection of Bloomburrow creature types represented as Glimmers. 8 of them in fact, with Rabbit and Frog missing. You know which two channels this server has dedicated for either of these animals? Basically I’m trying to say it’s surprisingly unbased. What is also prime for criticism is why is the rat Orzhov, which already has the Bat. I mean reading the card itself it may make sense since justifying White to reanimate stuff is more sensible than Blue being able to put stats on prowess permanents. And also there’s like two Kamigawa rats that deal with Orzhov, one of which last time I checked (eons ago) was played in Pioneer, so well. Guess it’s tolerable that the squirrel is just green and the raccoon is just red.
At this point I may be convinced that Alchemy is more of a way to save art budget than to design actual Hearthstoney cards. You know, you don’t have to make a showcase version and the normal version will never get scanned in a high enough quality (well unless Goa’dthul Verhey actually reaches out to select some designs for his protestable against convention exclusive draft set). All at the cost of putting one word in the dictionary of things people would rather not deal with in paper. And that one word with time got increasingly subtle. Until now.