But more importantly if the card got banned or restricted, you were given one rare wild card. Each rare that you opened or crafted or drafted was worth, more or less, one rare wildcard. Before Alchemy (and the modifications to Historic), owning a card that was legal in Historic had something resembling permanent value. Because eventually, whether it’s a month from now or a couple of years from now, and whether it’s worth a hundred dollars or tens of thousands of dollars, it’s going to be obsolete. So if you want to play fun games with the cards you already own and aren’t that interested in buying more, I’d suggest that you find some friends to play around your kitchen table.
Every format, from the oldest to the most recent, rotates. To put it simply: there is no longer such a thing as an “eternal” format. Ultimately, this connection has a huge implication to the way that you play Magic as compared with the past, as well as the frequency you’ll be buying cards in the future. However, rather than simply be annoyed, which I was in the beginning, I noticed a connection from the creation of Alchemy to other decisions that WotC has made in the past year.
Still others are annoyed because the Magic community could find a way to be annoyed at kittens and free money. Others are annoyed that the cards that will be used in paper formats (paper defined as “Commander and not much else”) will read and play differently on Arena that it will at their local game shop. Some people are angry because of the extra money needed to cover the 30-60 playsets of rares and mythics that will be necessary to build new decks (which you’ll certainly need to be competitive in Historic or Alchemy). Ever since Wizards of the Coast announced the new format of Alchemy coming to Arena, there’s been a lot of discussion on what this format means for the future of MTG and the reasoning behind it.