That's the whole point of the jam. It's not supposed to be easy. If you want depth effects, find a way without changing alpha. The rules are the rules, deal with it.
Of course! I wasn't complaining about the rules. I just accidentally made a cool effect when scaling a texture down and didn't know if I could use it. I see how I might have been coming across as complaining, sorry. I just wanted to understand the rule correctly, and also to know if I had to fix my text that has transparent pixels on the edges.