Looking to buff yourself and nerf your opponents in Magic Arena? Try one of these Alchemy decks for the best builds on a budget.

Magic The Gathering is home to many different formats and ways to play the game. Its digital game, Magic: Arena, has its own share of exclusive formats thanks to its unique card pool. Among these exclusive formats is Alchemy, a format that utilizes digital-only mechanics, such as buffing weak cards and nerfing powerful ones.

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Alchemy can be an expensive format due to the number of rares and mythic rares that some of the best decks use. However, there are plenty of powerful decks you can easily build on a budget, with them not requiring more than one playset of a rare.

The staple of budget decks, Lifegain is a common archetype due to how easy it is to build a strong deck without a lot of investment in wildcards. Selesnya Lifegain is the best build of it for Alchemy, including being one of the default decks available to new players. With a few wildcards, it can be upgraded to a rather powerful version of it.

Selesnya Lifegain is a deck based around creatures with triggers whenever you gain life. This is often accomplished with creatures that gain life whenever another creature enters the battlefield. Cards like Trelasarra, Moon Dancer, and Voice Of The Blessed are your best payoffs, allowing you to make powerful threats that can get out of hand quickly.

The Equipment mechanic didn't see much play in Standard, but thanks to some rebalancing for some key enablers, they are able to shine in Alchemy. Boros Equipment had multiple cards buffed in Alchemy, allowing for a powerful deck to emerge that didn't need much wildcard investment.

The deck focuses around putting powerful Equipment on creatures that are boosted up even further when equipped. Kor Blademaster gives all-equipped Warriors double strike, a creature type almost all your creatures are. Bruenor Battlehammer lets you easily equip your Equipment, as it allows you to pay zero mana to do so instead of whatever cost it normally has.

Izzet Tempo is a spellslinger deck based around using low-mana instants and sorceries that boost up other creatures. Thanks to some Alchemy re-works to cards like Symmetry Sage, it's a deck that can swing the game in their favor very quickly.

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Utilizing cards like Delver Of Secrets and Ledger Shredder that can easily gain flying, Symmetry Sage makes their base stats better. This is especially useful for Ledger Shredder since it gets counters easily. Fading Hope and Play With Fire help to maintain tempo, setting the opponent's game state back while setting up your own for a burst of massive damage.

Mono-Red Aggro is a staple of many formats, and Alchemy is no exception. This version of the deck utilizes cards that mix in burn with the usual aggressive low-mana creatures, often with haste. Big Spender is an Alchemy-original card that helps ensure you always have mana to cast spells, as whenever one or more creatures are blocked, you get a Treasure token.

Reinforced Ronin and Ambergris, Citadel Agent, both help you to draw cards while being solid creatures, ensuring that you will never run out of steam from playing out your hand so quickly.

Rakdos Sacrifice is an archetype that sees play in just about every format on Arena. The Alchemy version has the extra bonus of being one of the best decks in the format, one that can be built with just four rare wildcards. Sanguine Brushstroke is the star of the deck, giving you a copy of Blood Artist on the field to trigger off every sacrifice you make.

Sanguine Brushstroke will also burn for one damage whenever a Blood token is sacrificed, and with cards like Voldaren Epicure and Bloodtithe Harvester, it's easy to get plenty of Blood tokens on the field. Oni-Cult Anvil allows you to get a constant stream of sacrifice fodder onto the field, to keep the Blood Artist triggers coming.

Dimir Zombies has gotten a nice boost in Alchemy thanks to the buffing of cards like Falcon Abomination. There are many payoffs for Zombies, with multiple playable lords that give Zombies power and toughness boosts. It's one of the few archetypes that can take full advantage of Snow lands being available thanks to Narfi, Betrayer King, another card buffed thanks to Alchemy changes.

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Champion Of The Perished is one of the largest payoffs, growing with each Zombie entering the battlefield. Thanks to its color, Dimir Zombies can act as a midrange deck, with powerful removal and counterspells both available in it.

Burn is one of the most common archetypes in all the formats, and is often a top strategy for budget players. Alchemy is no exception, with a budget Boros Burn deck being a powerful choice in the format. Boros Burn is built around powerful burn spells as well as creatures that can deal extra burn damage to deal massive amounts of damage directly to your opponent's life total.

Toralf's Disciple even lets you conjure four copies of Lightning Bolt, a burn spell staple in all burn decks, right into your deck. When mixed in with multiple triggers of Kessig Flamebreather and Thermo-Alchemist, it's not uncommon to deal more than a quarter of the opponent's life total with just a few cards.

While the Runes version is more popular, Selesnya Enchantments is a fantastic budget version of the deck utilizing most of the same core. While that deck is focused on Runes, Selesnya Enchantments is more focused on broad enchantments giving boosts to other creatures.

Thanks to Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, Alchemy has a ton of big payoffs for playing enchantments like Kami Of Transience and Michiko's Reign Of Truth. It even has enchantment removal in Circle Of Confinement and Borrowed Time to let you control the board while giving your enchantment creatures more power and toughness.

The venture mechanic was the biggest winner when it came to Alchemy adjustments. It made no splash in Standard but with the changes, became a top-tier threat in Alchemy. While the strongest Venture decks need a lot of rares and mythics, a budget version is still perfectly playable. The only rare that's a necessity is Triumphant Adventurer.

Thanks to its Orzhov colors, Orzhov Venture has access to fantastic removal, with Precipitous Drop also allowing you to venture further into your dungeons. It's a fantastic mid-range deck, with venturing allowing you to maintain tempo easily with how many ways you can trigger it.

Thanks to Fearsome Whelp, almost every combination of Dragons is playable in Alchemy so long as it runs red to play it. While Simic may be the most powerful version, Izzet Dragons is a fantastic budget choice that still has a lot of power to it.

Fearsome Whelp will continuously discount your Dragons' each upkeep, allowing you to cast high-mana Dragon creatures for much cheaper and flood the field with their powerful effects. The Izzet Dragon build lets you play a more tempo-oriented one with cads like Fading Hope and Divide By Zero, keeping your opponent's creatures off the field or keeping yours safe in a pinch.

Next: Magic: The Gathering Arena - The Best Decks For The Alchemy Format

Johnny Garcia is a long time gamer and writer based in sunny California. Having worked many odd jobs, including article writing, he is now a list writer for TheGamer.com. Having grown up around video games and being raised on them, his knowledge of video games is as high as it can be. Aside from video games, he also has an avid interest in trading card games, namely Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic the Gathering.