New Enchantment Mimics Busted Card That’s Spent 18 Years on Banlist

Last updated on February 3, 2026

Blighted Nightmare | Illustration by Caio Monteiro

I know the general feelings towards Alchemy on Arena aren't positive, but I gotta tell you, the last few batches of Alchemy cards have been bangers. Maybe it's because I only engage with them through Cube and can “turn off” which ones aren't relevant for the format I engage with most, but they've really been nailing some of these digital-only designs lately.

The latest batch of cards comes from Lorwyn Eclipsed Alchemy, and features a bunch of cool effects, many of which supplement the creature types from the main set. One of the standouts is a new enchantment that pays homage to a classically overpowered card: Recurring Nightmare.

Blighted Nightmare

Look folks, Recurring Nightmare is banned in Commander for a reason. It's such an incredible value engine with ETB creatures that Commander axed it back in 2008 and never looked back. Arguments have been made for releasing the card from its shackles, or at least moving it to Game Changer status, but the old Exodus enchantment should stay exactly where it's at.

So if you're not going to unban a card, why not riff on it and make a new version? Blighted Nightmare does exactly that, incorporating Lorwyn Eclipsed‘s new blight mechanic with the classically busted effect of Recurring Nightmare.

Here you've got a similar templating to Soul Immolation, where the mana value of the creature you return is gated by the highest toughness you have in play. As with Immolation, you don't actually have to kill off your highest toughness creature–that just determines how high X can be. You can blight onto anything you control. So, if you've got a 5/5 and a 1/1 in play, you can blight 5 onto your 1/1, essentially “sacrificing” it to reanimate any creature with mana value 5 or less.

That's a pretty big restriction that prevents you from chaining a creature on turn 2 into something like Archon of Cruelty on turn 3, unless you've got an early discard/mill effect plus some sort of high-toughness 2-drop. Stitcher's Supplier into Caelorna, Coral Tyrant into Blighted Nightmare, anyone? Format solved?

There's more to the card here, with Blighted Nightmare giving all creatures in your graveyard a perpetual +1/+1 upon entering. For those unfamiliar, “perpetual” bonuses never go away, so those creatures will receive a permanent buff for the remainder of the game, regardless of zone-switching. That means the creatures you reanimate are always larger than normal, and they have higher toughness to raise the blight threshold when you replay Blighted Nightmare. You can imagine a prolonged chain of casting and recasting Nightmare, growing everything in your yard, and looping the same creatures until they're monstrous in size. Not to mention you might just make your entire graveyard swole for a mass reanimation effect like Raise the Past or something similar.

This is similar gameplay that you see with Recurring Nightmare in formats like Vintage Cube. Sometimes you bring back some giant reanimation target like Atraxa, Grand Unifier, and other times you're just looping value creatures to out-resource the opponent.

Three's the Charm

Blighted Nightmare isn't the first direct callback to Recurring Nightmare. That honor belongs to Chthonian Nightmare, and energized version of the effect that's worse at bringing back expensive creatures, but so much better at looping small value dudes since it costs 1 mana less than the others. At any rate, the Nightmare trio is complete, and there are reason to want to run any of them over the others.

Of course, there's format discrepencies between them all. Blighted Nightmare is an Alchemy card, and therefore is only playable in select Arena formats, and basically doesn't exist for paper play (sorry Commander folks, you get plenty). Recurring Nightmare exists on the Arena client, but isn't currently craftable, and only appears in the Arena Powered Cube. And Chthonian Nightmare doesn't have much of a home outside of custom Cubes, and is also generally unpronouncable (“Thonian”).

Alchemy's at its absolute best when it's doing things you can't do in paper, but doing so in a way that feels like interesting and unique card design. Taking a classic Magic card and “Alchemizing” it seems perfect, and in this case produced an intriguing digital-only take on a traditionally powerful effect.