Hasbro, the firm ultimately in charge of Magic: the Gathering and its digital spin-off Magic the Gathering: Arena, is recruiting a new senior game designer to take control of the digital-only Alchemy format. This isn’t a coding job: Hasbro is looking for someone with a vision for Alchemy cards and sets, who can lead the design team, and collaborate with the coders in ‘Studio X’ crunching the code.
If you only play paper Magic the Gathering, or prefer to keep your MTG Arena decks free of digital-only cards, you might not have thought about the MTG Alchemy format in years. It has evolved into something quite distinctive since it launched, with a two year rotation rather than three years, rebalanced versions of standard-legal cards, and unique designs that are only possible in a computer game.
Though it runs somewhat in parallel with Standard, Alchemy cards tend to be more powerful. Only a few are designed each set, and the design team tends to aim high so that there’s a reason to pick them over the best cards from Standard. That, plus the shorter rotation cutting out a year of Standard releases, means the meta is really distinctive.
If you think you’re the person to take the format in hand, you’ll find the job opening listed on the Hasbro careers website. Hasbro lists compensation in the range of $108,222 to $182,780 for the role, plus benefits.
Whoever lands the role will “analyze, monitor, and report the state of all playable formats on Arena” and “champion ongoing gameplay balancing changes” to “ensure delightfully compelling gameplay”. That will be informed by data, their own knowledge, and internal playtesting.
They’ll also “supervise” upcoming MTG sets to try and spot “cards requiring special handling” such as “pre-bans” in certain formats, before they’re ever available on the MTG release schedule.
It’s actually not too hard to get into Alchemy on MTG Arena at the moment. Standard-legal red aggro decks works pretty much perfectly in Alchemy without any new cards, while the Bloomburrow red white mouse deck only really wants one particularly good Alchemy Mythic, the Recruit Instructor.
If you want to experiment with a few Alchemy cards in a Brawl deck, make sure you’ve used all the MTG Arena codes in our guide to unlock a bunch of free digital packs!
Source: Wargamer
