Alchemy Is Magic: The Gathering Arena's Least-Played Format By A Huge Amount

thegamer.com:

Ever since it launched for Magic: The Gathering Arena late last year, Alchemy has had a rough ride full of controvery. To add insult to injury, it also appears to be its least-played format by quite a considerable margin.

Alchemy is Arena’s rotating, digital-exclusive format, where cards and mechanics made solely for digital play can be used. As well as gaining access to every card in the more traditional Standard format, it freely rebalances (or erratas) cards that become too problematic, and is shored up by smaller, made-for-Alchemy releases between sets.

RELATED: Magic: The Gathering Arena's Formats Explained – What Are Standard, Historic, Alchemy, Explorer, Limited, And Brawl?

Unfortunately, the latest stats out of untapped.gg (via reddit) paint a grim picture for Alchemy. It is currently the least-played format in the game with an abysmal 42,000 players, trailing behind Historic (another digital-centric format), which sites at 250,000. The only made-for-digital format that even remotely comes close to the tabletop-based formats like Standard and Explorer is Historic Brawl, at 360,000 players.

While Explorer is exclusively played in Arena, with its tabletop equivalent being Pioneer, it makes no use of digital rebalancing or mechanics like seek or conjure. Instead, it is a “true-to-tabletop” format that aims to reproduce Pioneer as closely as it can. Ever since its launch in April, it has proven to be a huge success, picking up almost 500,000 players.

Despite all that, the leader for MTG Arena is still the format it was designed for: Standard. Between the best-of-three and best-of-one ladders, there have been almost three million players. Standard is Magic’s overall premiere format, and is the format major tentpole