General Alchemy, Playtest, Funny and other strange cards

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Why interesting? You turn the petal in a 2/1 for 0. And then you cannot recur it. All fine and dandy but who cares about a 2/1?
Then you can’t recur it with Mischievous Lookout, but you can now Unearth your Lotus Petal (or whatever you reanimated). Very cool custom, I think.
 
Why interesting? You turn the petal in a 2/1 for 0. And then you cannot recur it. All fine and dandy but who cares about a 2/1?
Who peed in your cereals this morning?

I do think it is interesting. Now your Chromatic Star can receive Arcbound Ravager counters. Sacrifice it to Warren Soultrader for mana and cards. Now all your creatures can sacrifice themselves for cards (or mana with the Petal) if you have Agatha's Soul Cauldron. It opens lines of play that were not possible before and forces you to recontextualize picks and sequences of play.
 
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Interesting design. Could be fun with cards like Chromatic Star, Chromatich Sphere, Urza's Bauble, Mishra's Bauble and Lotus Petal.
This is a surprisingly clever design, I did not expect that from an Alchemy set much less one with the word "perpetually" on it.

Here's the thing: Lurrus is absolutely broken. While it's companion that pushes it over the line, the fact is that it enables all sorts of nasty play patterns: Bring back Dauntless Bodyguard, bring it back with Animate Dead or use it to bring back Animate dead. Kill a creature every turn with Executioner's capsule, draw one with Mishra's Bauble. It does everything and it does that at an extremely permissive mana cost and, yes, lifelink.

This guy seems designed to fix those issues.

- You can only recur cards once: After that, they turn into creatutes so you cannot keep playing them over and over.
- Creatures don't have haste: Hence, your value spells don't payoff immediately but take one turn. This reduces the instant snowball of Lurrus, though it does limit it quite significantly.
- It cannot self-enchant itself: This not only prevents Animate Dead, but a ton of dumb self-protection combos that do work with Lurrus.

I like that it's an enchantment, too. It is ugly as sin, though. And, in cube, I do like the interaction with Animate Dead.
 
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Channel! Gain that life back for more shenanigans.
 
This set somehow had five "these are just paper cards" in my book:


This has no reason to be Alchemy except "perpetually", which doesn't really add anything interesting to the card for me even if it does sometimes matter with bounce or reanimation.


"Remembering who went first" has been firmly cemented as an Alchemy effect now, whether or not it should be (honestly, I'm on the fence, it's easy on turns 1-8 but if the game drags on...)


No reason for this nerd to get perpetually bigger. It'd even be more synergistic with +1/+1 counters!


...okay, seriously, I don't know what's Alchemy about this one. Like all the others have caveats, but this and Eager Flameguide could have just been printed?
 
Here's one I've been having fun with lately:

This card initially appears like just a dumb non sequitur joke but it's actually a pretty great parody of the way that fast mana functions in magic. Takes the high variance of fast mana openers and rubs your face in it and lets the other player get to high roll sometimes too. Very fun and funny card for a cube where you're okay with some horseshit occuring. Good joke to play it alongside moxen. Hilarious joke to play it as the only mox in a budget cube. Plays like an old pokemon TCG card.
 
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