To identify cards not on Arena I mainly relied on human intelligence, namely my own, or, as may be the case, lack thereof. In part because Wizards' own Gatherer persists in a staunch denial of most everything that has to do with Arena, acting as the vigilante hero we deserve more than the hero we need, it isn't trivial to cross-reference decklists published by Wizards with a database of Explorer legality. Finally, it is possible that I left out cards because I simply didn't notice them as missing pieces. I ignored sideboards too as their contents aren't typically part of what makes a deck functional, more bonus than bone and easier to replace. I ignored lands, except those essential to a strategy, meaning Thespian's Stage and Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx. The decks built around them and the decks built against them don't necessarily tell us much about the current state of the format. Banned in Pioneer and unlikely to come back, it makes sense to exclude them, and not just them. If I had gone further back, I would have found massive evidence of two additional cards that also aren't legal in Explorer now: Expressive Iteration and Winota, Joiner of Forces. This amounts to 192 decks played to a positive record in a meaningfully competitive setting between June 11 and June 26. ![]() To find out I looked at all the published decks from the six most recent Pioneer Challenges on Magic Online at the time of writing. In fact, this Eye should draw our eye to the more relevant question of how many of these cards appear in relevant decks. By the time you're reading this, the number may already be down, which forces us to admit that, actually, Alchemy Horizons: Baldur's Gate does have one good thing to it, after all, even if it's just one card and the card in question is Pilgrim's Eye. "All the Cards That Matter"Īccording to Scryfall, there are 3,247 cards legal in Pioneer but not legal in Explorer today. Because the cards necessary to give us a reasonable approximation of Pioneer paper play only number in the dozens, a mere fraction of the current Alchemy output. What tastes equal parts bitter and sweet is the fruit of knowing how close Pioneer could be if they stopped wasting their efforts on six-sided Alchemy abominations no one knew anyone wanted and instead focused on delivering the goods so many people are clamoring for. Because now they can't claim it's too hard to program Emrakul, the Promised End, or purport problems with delve, which doesn't exist on the client yet. It is nice to know that the Arena team has the resources to implement so many cards that break the rules of Magic. Okay, the previous sentence may be steeped in petty sarcasm, but the following isn't. It's nice knowing that the programmers got time for this. On the other hand, it doesn't take a particularly mean observer to raise an eyebrow at the fact that, within a 36-day stretch alone, Arena can add 405 cards in support of Alchemy, with a total text exceeding 15,000 words. ![]() We were told to "consider this the first leg of our Pioneer journey," that supporting Pioneer "will take several years to accomplish," and that, even then, we shouldn't expect the full card pool but just "all the cards that matter." Wizards made it clear that for now we have to make do with the Pioneer cards already on Arena anyway, in a placeholder format called Explorer. If we don't want to be mean, however, we must acknowledge that their most recent announcement did its best to temper expectations. These original plans were put on permanent hold one year ago, but not before being confirmed and concretized over and over in the intervening months. The earliest statement on working toward Pioneer I was able to find dates back to November 2019. If we wanted to be a little mean, we could also say it's been 32 months, as this wasn't the first time we got this promise. It's been eleven weeks, almost three months, since Wizards appeased a community up in arms with their announcement of Pioneer coming to Arena.
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