MTG News Sep 7 to 13: Alchemy Retired, 5 Historic Bans, Standard Goyf

⚡ SparkMTG — Alchemy Gets Deleted, Goyf Gets a Standard Card

Week of September 7 – 13, 2026

Wizards is not rebalancing Alchemy or shrinking it. The format is leaving MTG Arena entirely, and on the way out it takes five cards out of Historic with it. Tarmogoyf is Standard legal for the first time in its nineteen years, and the Reality Fracture story finished before the set is even out.

In This Issue

Previous Editions

Dave Finseth confirmed on September 11 that Alchemy is being retired with the next Standard rotation in early 2027. On September 22, more than 200 rebalanced tabletop cards on MTG Arena revert to their original printings, which is why Galvanic Discharge, Guide of Souls, Nadu, Winged Wisdom, Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord and The One Ring all get banned in Historic that day, with Nadu banned in Brawl on top of it. Wizards passed on banning Orcish Bowmasters, Alchemy: Reality Fracture arrives October 13 as the last Alchemy set, and the format disappears from Arena on February 2, 2027, a date you can find alongside every other confirmed set in our 2026 to 2027 release calendar. Read more →

Tarmogoyf is being reprinted into Standard for the first time since 2007, arriving as a mythic rare in Reality Fracture. Wargamer is not sold: the card defined high-powered Modern and once sold for $150, but against the power level of current Standard the piece doubts it sees play outside Sealed. Read more →

Emrakul, the Exigent Doom headlined Thursday, a ten-mana Eldrazi that untaps all your lands when you cast it and asks anyone answering it to sacrifice three permanents first. The rest of the week belonged to the paired versions of the same character that give the set its shape, Gideon the Oathless and Mabel, Valley Hero among them, and we broke that mechanic down in our guide to Reality Fracture's Echoed Pairs. Star City Games has the full card list for both days, and the set releases October 2. Read more →

Secrets of Strixhaven stapled Power Nine spells onto its Prepared cards, and Magic Online user jtl005 built an Azorius Control shell to cash that in, taking down a Challenge with it. Seam Rip and Get Lost answer creatures, No More Lies and Three Steps Ahead answer everything else, and full playsets of Emeritus of Truce hold the board. MTG Rocks sums up how it actually closes: by casting Ancestral Recall every turn. Read more →

Rielly Mitchell won the Modern Regional Championship Qualifier at F2F Tour St. John's 2026 with Domain Zoo. Face to Face has the winning decklist and the full Top 8. Read more →

Wizards revealed five Elder Sphinxes on Wednesday, the faculty who rule Hexhaven College, the Echoverse's mirror of Strixhaven. The flashiest is Kwia Vigorbloom, a mythic Selesnya Sphinx with flying, vigilance, lifelink and ward 2 that creates a token named Lotus once each turn whenever you gain life. That token taps and sacrifices for three mana of any one color, which is Black Lotus, and the lifelink means the Sphinx switches itself on. Read more →

The Echoverse recolored Vraska out of Golgari and into Jeskai, and Vraska, Soul of Stone is a three-mana Gorgon Wizard that creates a 1/1 Sculpture Treasure artifact creature every time you cast a noncreature spell. Those tokens attack and make mana the same turn if you have a haste enabler such as Alibou, Ancient Witness, Mass Hysteria or Tannuk, Steadfast Second, and MTG Rocks reaches for Skullclamp from there. She is also one of the commanders worth reading up on in our breakdown of all six Reality Fracture Commander precons. Read more →

Displacer Kitten blinks a permanent when you cast a noncreature spell. Flickering Hound, revealed this week, triggers when a creature is cast instead, which makes it an upgrade for the creature-dense blink decks built on Roon of the Hidden Realm or Brago, King Eternal. MTG Rocks expects it to become a format staple, and if you are slotting it into a precon, our precon upgrade playbook covers what to cut for it. Read more →

Breach the Bay 2 on August 22 ran a 429-player competitive EDH $25K alongside the annual TopDeck Invitational, and the two events scored differently. The Invitational used the usual points-for-a-win system and drew 35.59% of its games. Breach the Bay used the Japanese structure, where players ante a share of their points each round and nobody scores anything on a draw, and drew 9.89%. Read more →

Cut Down rose 700% in four days to an all-time high, driven by a surge of sales on Friday, September 4. The cause is its arrival among the Zeta Set commons that went Pauper-legal on September 7, a format where it is now one of the best black removal spells available. Read more →

Quiet Speculation's August metagame update calls the month a dramatic shift, with Energy losing the dominance it held over Modern. David's read is that the change may not last, and that it comes down mostly to taste. Read more →

MTG Price's buy-or-skip on the latest superdrop opens with the cadence rather than the cards, because this one landed two weeks after the last. The advice: spend to the level you actually have, skip the thirty-attempt queue, and wait for the next one, which is always close behind. Read more →

Episodes 9 and 10 close the story as the Echoverse starts overlaying the Multiverse. In the last of Jace's memory rooms, modeled on Ravnica's Implicit Maze, Chandra launches Vraska at her own double and Vraska petrifies her, while Ajani, Chandra and Garruk beat their doubles by switching targets. Liliana then confronts the Theorist, sends the lich Professor Opal at him and demands he undo the overlay, and he tells her he cannot. Read more → · Listen →

Wargamer spotted the pattern across the reveals: Gideon Jura's alternate is a selfish mercenary rather than the heroic martyr, Gallia of the Endless Dance went from frolicking party girl to zombified mourner, and Bloomburrow's Mabel is now working dark magic on a quest for revenge. The piece asks why the mirror universe came out uniformly edgy, evil or sad. For the planeswalker half of that shift, see our rundown of Reality Fracture's color-shifted planeswalkers, which covers the Liliana, Chandra and Garruk versions. Read more →

Drive to Work #1379 is a Fresh Out of Design episode recorded back in December 2023, when Mark Rosewater handed off the vision design for Reality Fracture, which makes it the earliest primary source on why this set exists. #1380 is the design history of Atogs, a creature type he says he had a huge hand in building. Listen → · Listen →

That's the week. If you play Historic or Brawl, circle September 22. Everyone else, previews wrap up Thursday and the set is less than three weeks out.

See you next Sunday,

— The SparkMTG Team

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