Personally, I think Alchemy wouldn't be as horribly received if it had better cards. That looks like a truism at first, but the point is that the potion mechanic, while not necessarily universally loved, still has lots of fans. But Alchemy is a tiny expansion, and of that expansion, at least two cards are so weak they are basically not there, one is Possession, and Scrying Pool has all that makes Spy bad, just on a card that's useful enough to be played often. If the set had more than just a few cards that are actually fun to play with, people wouldn't dislike it as much.
But yeah, we'll never know. I know I wouldn't bet money on Alchemy second edition.
I agree.
Me personally, I don't care about the strength of Alchemy cards so much as I care about there not being many of them. For a 2nd type of currency, there's really very few cards that use it, and the ratio shrinks with every expansion (for obvious reasons). At the time of release, about 10% of released cards used Potions, and I think 15%-25% might be best for a secondary currency. Today, about 3% of cards use Potions. The problem is that buying that potion has to really be worth it, but you don't want the Potion costing cards to be so good that the Potion becomes an auto-buy. So the interesting decisions seem to come from having 2 or 3 Alchemy cards out. Obviously, as Donald X has pointed out many times, you could just houserule it so that if an Alchemy card comes out then you put out at least one more. But you know, at this point in time we've seen all of those combinations so many times.
Of course, we all know the history of how Alchemy got this way, with it originally being the last big expansion planned and then getting split in half. No use crying over spilled milk. I mentioned that only about 3% of cards today use Potions, but at the same time I can't fault Donald X for that. Why would you release more cards from the least popular expansion when you have plenty of fun
new ideas that don't have that negative association? Especially given that- up until Adventures- there was a lot of hesitation to do anything resembling an "expansion to the expansion".
All I can say is that I definitely wouldn't want an Alchemy 2nd Edition. If there were ever going to be anything else Alchemy related, I would want it to be a new expansion of cards using Potions. A 2nd Edition wouldn't fix all of the issues in my opinion.
Not that I'm betting my money on that either. But I'd be happy if it existed.