Alchemy Crimson

116 cards · Epic

Buy packs

Alchemy Crimson

116 cards · Artist Don Butto

One sign did several jobs at once. Alchemy matched the seven metals known to the ancients to the seven wandering planets, so a single mark meant gold and the Sun, or lead and Saturn, or iron and Mars, and those same seven named the days of the week. A page of it is metallurgy, astronomy and a calendar in the same breath.

The notation was meant to be difficult. An alchemist worked alone and wrote for himself, or for the few men he trusted, so recipes travelled under cover names and every adept drifted toward a private set of marks. That is why one substance can carry a dozen different signs, and why much of what survives is still only half legible.

Black was not a failure in this work. It was the first stage of it. The Great Work opened with the nigredo, the blackening, in which the material was dissolved, left to putrefy and reduced to a dark mass before anything could be built out of it. The Rosarium Philosophorum of 1,550 is explicit that the matter must go entirely black before it can go anywhere else. Every transformation began in the dark.

Zone 7: The same 116 symbols in the reversed printing. These cards are no scarcer than the parchment set and no harder to complete. The difficulty is reaching the counter at all, because the packs open only to a seven week playing streak.

By Number By Rarity