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. 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). 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. Still others are annoyed because the Magic community could find a way to be annoyed at kittens and free money.

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. 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.

To put it simply: there is no longer such a thing as an “eternal” format. Every format, from the oldest to the most recent, rotates. 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. 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.

Let’s start with Historic itself. Before Alchemy (and the modifications to Historic), owning a card that was legal in Historic had something resembling permanent value. Each rare that you opened or crafted or drafted was worth, more or less, one rare wildcard. If you owned it, you could play it. But more importantly if the card got banned or restricted, you were given one rare wild card. In essence, it was a rare-dollar. The card would either remain at the current value or the rare-dollar was returned to you in wild card form after a banning for you to use again. But now, the average “value” of a rare that you own will decrease. Yes, it’s possible that you own a card like Cosmos Elixir that gets a buff rather than a nerf. But most of the buffed cards that have been previewed so far are buffed from “LOL so your homebrew you made on Opening Day of the format didn’t work out” to “well maybe if the stars aligned this might be good”.

On the other hand, the nerfs have been significant. The prime example of this is Luminarch Aspirant. Before the nerf, it was one of the most-played cards in both Standard and Historic and an important card in multiple tier decks. By nerfing the card (whether it was too good for Standard or not is a different debate), my prediction is that it isn’t good enough to be a major player in either format. If you obtained those four rares, starting on Thursday those cards are worth substantially less. On top of that, you receive zero compensation for that change. So your one rare-dollar of value in a copy of Aspirant will lose much of its value on Thursday. And if you’re playing one of those decks now, you’ll need a replacement card of reasonably similar value in order to continue playing your deck. And surprise: at the same time there are all of these new cards entering Historic that you can try and buy. In the end, the changes made to Historic through Alchemy will transform Historic into a rotating format. If one of your decks gets too good because of a good card, every month provides a sort of rotation…a chance that your valuable cards become less valuable and therefore need to be replaced with better (and generally newer) cards. That sounds like rotation to me.

But it’s not just Historic. Modern too is a rotating format. At its genesis, it was an attempt to create an eternal format that played with newer cards than what was to become Vintage or Legacy. And Modern worked like that for a long time. The decks that were played in Modern were iconic…they were such a part of the format that you could give them titles that meant something. Jund. Death and Taxes. Solar Flare. Ponza. If you bought into one of those decks, it was assumed that you’d be able to play that deck for years and years to come.

Have you heard much from those decks lately? Nope. And why is that? Modern Horizons. There have been two entire sets dedicated to Modern and released in the past couple of years that have completely obliterated the Modern metagame. The best example is Tarmogoyf. ‘Goyf was the essence of Modern. Turn 1 fetchland into Thoughtseize, turn 2 Goyf. It was like clockwork. Now? Goyf is a punchline. Six years ago, Tarmogoyf was a two HUNDRED dollar card. Now you can find copies for under fifty. It’s the WORST creature in Jund, fully supplanted by two cards printed in the past year in Dragon’s Rage Channeler and Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer. So if you owned Jund five years ago, your deck is worse, worth less, and would require you to buy over $500 of paper cards to make it a Tier 2.5 deck. So now, Wizards can “rotate” Modern whenever they want. They simply produce Modern Horizons 3, and you’re rotating Modern in the same sort of way Standard rotates–you have to replace older cards with a significant number of newer cards. And I haven’t even scratched the surface of the terror that Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis wrought on the format for a few weeks.

But, you might say, there’s always Vintage and Legacy. All you have to do is buy a set of the Power Nine and mortgage your house, and you’ll never have to worry about rotation again. Yet, while that is less true apart from That Damn Monkey (TM) that Modern Horizons is rotating the true Eternal formats, there’s been an additional wrench thrown into the works in the past month as, inexplicably, Wizards announced that the newest Un-set, Unfinity, will have the majority of its cards legal in Vintage and Legacy as well as Commander. Is this honestly something that anyone was asking for?

(Mini-rant on the Commander part: the idea that this change was done to facilitate these cards being “legal” in Commander is laughable to me. Commander is a casual format. Legality decisions should be made by the four people sitting at the table getting ready to play. “Hey, I have this Un-card in my deck…are you cool with that?” You don’t really need a random committee to give you permission to do this.)

So why? Why would any Legacy or Vintage players want potential killer game-show clowns to be in their $80,000 Tinker deck? They don’t.

But Wizards does. Wizards wants to be able to influence those formats as well. They’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of doing this with Commander products, but that was when Commander wasn’t as widely-played and you could get away with doing something freaky with Commander cards without the world noticing. But now that Commander has become the top-ranked paper format, it is in WotC’s interest to find another way to sneak new cards into those formats, and Un-sets, being relatively infrequent and low-selling sets, are a prime way to try to sneak some new cards into those formats to shake up the meta and (as much as is possible with such old cards and entrenched player bases) rotate the formats. I have no idea whether it will actually happen, but my guess is that they’re going to try if only to see if it’s possible. It wouldn’t take much, honestly. It took a colorless land and a one-mana monkey in Modern Horizons 2. I’ll be very interested to see if something sticks out in Unfinity.

In the end, if you’re looking for the pure Magic, the untouched, uncut purity of The Game As Richard Garfield Intended, I’m not sure it exists any more. Change is not only inevitable, but it also payeth the rent. And if this is objectionable to you, you’re going to have to make the pro/con comparisons that every adult needs to make about everything from jobs to love. Is Magic a game or a racket? Is Magic in 2021 a love or a chore? It might be both.