A-Fall of the Impostor
Two chapters of optional +1/+1 counters buy time while the removal ticks toward arrival, and that deferred structure is the honest cost of two-mana Saga removal: you telegraph the exile a full lore-counter cycle in advance, and it lands two chapters after the Saga enters rather than immediately. What separates the Alchemy rework from its paper original is a single word. The paper version already exiled the creature with the greatest power among a target opponent's board; the digital patch drops the requirement that the creature itself be targeted. The opponent stays named as the target, but the threat slated for exile no longer is, which lets the answer reach past hexproof and ward that the original would have bounced off of. That is the entire change, and it is worth studying as a case of digital balance operating at the margin: not a reprint, not a new effect, just the removal of a targeting restriction that was quietly gating the payoff. Everything else survives intact. The "greatest power" clause still aims the exile at the top of the opponent's board rather than letting you clip a mana dork, so the rework sharpens what the removal can reach without loosening where it points. The edit is narrow enough that many players will never notice it, which is precisely the point: the smallest possible intervention that fixes the one case where the effect embarrassed itself.
