This Card Is Going To Break Alchemy Alongside Hinata, Dawn-Crowned • MTG Arena Zone

Hello everyone!

With Alchemy Horizons: Baldur’s Gate’snow completed, I already analyzed Viconia, Nightsinger’s Disciple, Karlach, Raging Tiefling, Ulder Ravengard, Marshal, and The Hourglass Coven, but there’s still more cards to look at! It seems that this set is certainly not playing around as we have a card that’s absolutely busted alongside Hinata, Dawn-Crowned. How does a functional draw 10+ and put a permanent from your hand into play for free sound? That’s obviously insane, but must cost upwards of like 10+ mana, right? Well, you’re half right! While this can be expensive, with Hinata, Dawn-Crowned, that’s made possible for TWO MANA. What card could possibly do this? Snowborn Simulacra.

view card details

So for UUX, you can conjure as many nontoken permanents as you want into your hand, and if this exceeds 5, you can play one for free. Normally speaking, this card would be pretty bad. The base rate for a draw two is 3 mana, and this wouldn’t even do that much. You’d only start to get your value back once you hit five or six mana as Jace's Ingenuity and Opportunity are less embarrassing, but still not ideal considering you’re copying permanents at sorcery speed rather than drawing cards at instant speed. So initially, this seems like a bulk Mythic as it could have a powerful effect, but will mostly be too costly to see play. That’s where Hinata, Dawn-Crowned comes in.

view card details

You see, Hinata, Dawn-Crowned makes a spell cost 1 less for each target a spell has, something that has been abused to great effect with Magma Opus in Standard (and other formats!) The thing about Magma Opus is that it’s hard to cast, but if you get it out with Hinata, you can cast it early for a game breaking effect. However, even if you have to cast it naturally at 8 mana, it’s still powerful so it’s not like you’re forced to have Hinata to make this card tenable. Seeing a pattern?

While Snowborn Simulacra may seem a bit weak on the surface, I believe it’s going to fulfill a very similar role that Magma Opus does in the deck. If you don’t have a Hinata out and can get to seven mana, conjuring five cards to hand and then getting to play one of them for free is sure to be a pretty powerful play. If there’s a good permanent on board, you get to match it and net four cards in the process. If there isn’t, then drawing a bunch of cards is far from the worst thing in the world, even if it’s mostly lands. However, in most cases, you’re likely to nab a few strong permanents and a few lands which should give you a good amount of gas to work with. What happens when you have a Hinata out though? Well, that’s just magical.

On turn 6, without any additional mana, you can hypothetically cast a Hinata, Dawn-Crowned and then conjure a copy of EVERY nontoken permanent and get it into your hand, and then play one of those for free. That means every creature, planeswalker, artifact, enchantment, land, you want it, you have it. Early Magma Opus seemed hard to beat coming from Hinata, but now you have the threat of refilling your entire hand, getting a back up Hinata, and a free spell afterwards? That’s just the nightmare.

Jeskai Hinata, at times, is too slow out of the gate to secure the win. While it doesn’t necessarily have this issue in Standard, Alchemy is a much more powerful format so it makes sense why Hinata hasn’t made much of a splash. However, now that we have not one, but two broken cards to pair along with Hinata, the power level of the deck has increased significantly and your nut draws will be that much more common.

view card details

It’s not the easiest to rate Snowborn Simulacra on my typical 1-5 scale as a lot of it has to do with the ubiquity of the card, and realistically, this will never see play unless it’s paired with Hinata, Dawn-Crowned. However, the fact that it works so ridiculously well with Hinata, Dawn-Crowned is what makes this card so potent and so scary coming into the new Alchemy format. So, if we were evaluating the card in a vacuum, I’d likely give it a 2 to 2.5 rating as it would be pretty unlikely to see play although it can have a powerful effect. With the context of Hinata though, we have to amend it as this very well may turn the format on it’s head.