Last week I just about managed to wade through Coldsnap. This week, it’s Time Spiral on our Rotation Retrospective, which weighs in at an almost double-the-size-of-Coldsnap 286 cards. No time to waste then, and we kick off with one of the big headline makers.
White
Before Pro Tour: Yokohama in 2007, the big buzz was all about the re-emergence of White Weenie decks. A bit like Christmas, White Weenie comes around every year, and a bit like Christmas, only small children like it. And, a bit like Christmas, it becomes painfully clear that the precious White Weenie toy that you’ve unwrapped this year is every bit as rubbish as the White Weenie toy you unwrapped last year. As my coverage colleague Magic Dave is fond of saying, ‘there was one White Weenie deck in history that was any good, and that had Armageddon in it.’ Ironically, given the hype surrounding the White deck during Time Spiral Block, it is now that the White deck has come to the fore once again, without Armageddon but with a plethora of ‘unzip’ spells which present a threat package all in a single card. I refer of course to Spectral Procession and Cloudgoat Ranger. That conversation is for another time about twelve months hence. For now, just remember that in the week leading up to the Pro Tour in Japan, seven of the eight slots in a Magic Online Premier Event went to the White Weenie hordes. At the actual Pro Tour, the sum total of White decks that survived Day 1 was somewhere around the two mark, and Antti Malin was the highest-placed finisher in a stupendous 50th. So here are some of the cards that caused such a fuss…
The big excitement was over Serra Avenger. Sometimes hype can be misleading, but actually for this girl it was dead on, and that was the problem. The hype went that you got a 3/3 flyer for only 2 mana, with the only drawback being that you couldn’t actually cast her until turn 4. Given that you had any number of other things you wanted to do with your first three turns, this wasn’t a problem. The problem was that a 3/3 flyer was all you got, and that turned out not to be the golden ticket once the Pros got their hands on the Block Constructed format for Yokohama. White Weenie players were also kind of excited by Griffin Guide, a creature enchantment that sought to negate the fundamental disadvantages of said card class by getting a flyer back. As a win condition, Fortify turned out to be quite popular. Although White Weenie was where the focus lay, in fact plenty of other white cards gave players fun/naughty things to do. Mangara Of Corondor was worded cunningly so that, if you had a way to untap him, or even better untap him multiple times, you could 2-for-1 or even more-for-1 your opponent. That’s because removing Mangara from the game wasn’t part of the cost, but part of the resolution of his ability. Although some tried to make this work in a Constructed setting, it was basically a Limited trick of much fun. A card that some people managed to misread, at least to begin with, was Castle Raptors. Fundamentally a 3/3 flyer, it was quite the roadblock on defense, with its +2 toughness bonus. I certainly saw several people attempt to kill it by dealing three damage to it. Oops.
By and large, cheap is good news for Constructed, and our next three all saw Constructed play. As the Yokohama Metagame evolved in testing rooms around the globe, it became apparent that Pull From Eternity was a sufficiently good answer to Suspended cards that it deserved more than just a walk-on Sideboard role in some decks. With Aeon Chronicler and Detritivore headlining the Suspend charge, with Greater Gargadon not far behind, a simple, cheap, effective answer was a subtle but important part of the arsenal of the control decks that came to dominate that Pro Tour. Also an ‘answer’ card was Temporal Isolation, a good example of a card that 95% of the time only did one thing, and 5% of the time did something really rather fine. The first thing was that it prevented all damage dealt by a creature, and when I say creature, I basically mean Bogardan Hellkite. Green-Red mana ramp decks got severely hacked off when they finally made it to eight mana, only to find their dragon was not only prevented from spraying around its comes-into-play damage, but all subsequent forays into the red zone as well. Isolation didn’t do badly at making Aeon Chroniclers irrelevant either. However, the really obnoxious bit was when the Isolation rebounded on you. See, this wasn’t Pacifism, and players would often turn their Hellkite sideways, even though they were going to deal no damage, in order to lull the defender into ignoring the mighty dragon. Then – oops – in came the dragon one more time, and it couldn’t basically be blocked because the Temporal Isolation had given it Shadow, damage went on the stack and then – oops again – Krosan Grip dispensed with the Isolation, and the big bad dragon boy was back in town. In the long run however, the clear winner in White from Time Spiral was Momentary Blink. Throughout the two year run in Standard, players found ways to abuse the instant with any number of cards with comes-into-play abilities. The URW Blink Riders for example benefitted from the landkill nature of Avalanche Riders, avoiding echo (avoiding echo) and killing a second or even a third land courtesy of the Blink Flashback. In some environments since 2006 the idea of Tier 1 decks has become almost meaningless, since there were so many viable decks. However, it’s probably the case that dedicated Blink decks lurked just behind the very best, waiting for subtle Metagame shifts to allow them the breathing room to display their full array of tricks.
Blue
Make no mistake, there was a ton of useful and interesting Blue cards in Time Spiral. We start at the very beginning with Ancestral Vision, a card with a fascinating history through its life. Someone of the stature of Mike Flores could probably write you an entire article about this card, but the headline is this: Ancestral Vision was a source of enormous card advantage, with a minimal Investment most often at a time when a supply of mana was freely available to Blue mages with nothing else to do, i.e. Turn 1. The fascinating thing about this was how it constantly vacillated in and out of decks as the speed of the Metagame shifted. In fact, it’s fair to say that you could almost precisely gauge the shape of the Metagame by whether Vision was an appropriate card to play. Initially it took a while for people to realise just how powerful the spell could be, surprising when you consider it has the words ‘draw three cards’ on it, which ought to set all sorts of Blue alarm bells ringing as to its goodness. Then, just when everyone understood it was great, it fell from favor, since hanging about for all those pesky Suspend counters to disappear was just taking too long. And now, as we saw when Paul Cheon made the National team in Chicago last month, the card-drawer was absolutely back with a bang, and it’s an odd thought that there was a time where Pestermite went into a Faeries build and Ancestral Vision did not. A real Metagame card.
Next up is Brine Elemental, a card that combined perfectly with Vesuvan Shapeshifter to form a lock in the Soggy Pickles decks that relied on a constant stream of unmorphing. Cancel held the straight-up counterspell slot at 3 mana, and as we saw with Coldsnap’s Rune Snag, that was generally one too many. On the card-drawing front, Careful Consideration became a Constructed staple, as it combined guaranteed card advantage with the flexibility of casting it at end of turn if you were really digging for answers. This is one of the many spells that I indelibly associate with Guillaume Wafo-Tapa, a man who can do nothing better than any other Magician. Bear in mind that Careful Consideration is pretty close to a ‘splashy,’ ‘exciting,’ ‘over the top’ spell in a Wafo-Tapa deck, and I’ll wager that few people have cast it more often at Sorcery speed with less concern for what the opposition might do.
A card that makes me tired all over whenever I see it is Draining Whelk. This has nothing to do with this fine card, but a Pavlovian response to Grand Prix: Amsterdam in 2007. That was the mighty Two-Headed Giant tournament, and to say it ran long is being generous. Rounds were taken off Day 1, and it still finished on, technically, Day 2, and Day 2 finished, you guessed it, on Day 3, with Amiel Tenenbaum and Gabriel Nassif falling to Messrs Havlic and Hornansky at something approaching 1am. In 2HG, it turned out that you wanted to play with every counterspell in the known universe, since you could be certain that your opponents would be playing with every comedy rare in their pool, just like you were in yours. Errant Ephemeron was a Limited beating, both in Sealed and Draft. One of the less surprising ‘surprises’ was what happened when Fathom Seer unmorphed. I lost count of the number of people who tried to deal two damage to a morph only to find one of these underneath. Something else I lost count of over the last two years was the number of times Mystical Teachings got chained together. What a spectacular card this was, a Tutor of outstanding credentials that rivalled in its own time the power of fearsome tutors from the past in theirs. Indeed I’ll stick my neck out and say that in Block this might have been the most influential card in the entire Block. There’s competition for that slot, but it’s my placeholder for now unless I find something even more entertaining in about 2000 words time.
Riftwing Cloudskate was an odd little card. On the face of it, nothing it did was sufficient to merit much of a place anywhere. It was a 2/2 flyer. Fine. For 5 mana. Not so fine. It had a tempo effect. Fine. But it hardly backed it up with much in the way of pressure. Not so fine. Of course it could be cheaper with Suspend. Definitely fine. But, and with this card there was always a but, you had to wait until approximately Tuesday. Not. Fine. So how did this make its way into all kinds of powerful decks? It really revolves around the words ‘comes into play,’ because Reveillark and Momentary Blink to name but two had a nasty habit of turbo-charging and multi-charging this innocuous little flyer. One of the real surprise hits across multiple formats.
And now we come to the King of Controversy. Rarely have I seen a card so polarizing of public opinion. Everybody had a view – not as to whether it was a good card, since it was blatantly amazing from the start – but whether the card should have existed at all. I refer of course to Teferi, Mage Of Zhalfir. That’s Teferi, Mage Of Suspend Goes Away. Teferi, Mage Of Mystical Teachings Gets Any Monster I Like. Teferi, Mage Of All My Guys Have Flash. Teferi, Mage Of Three A Turn Smashy Smashy. Teferi, Mage Of Your Counterspells Are Blank. Teferi, Mage Of Burn Spells At Sorcery Speed Only. In short, Teferi, Mage Of Wicked Good. [Teferi, Mage Of Doesn’t Work In Multiples — Craig, amused.] Even my greatest friend in the game, a man who bleeds counterspells, simply shakes his head at the mention of this staggering spell. Short of having Shroud, it’s hard to imagine a more glorious weapon for the blue mage, since Force Of Will isn’t being reprinted anytime soon. A thing of beauty, a thing of hate, but an era-defining creature.
From a card that did almost everything except make dinner for after you won, to a card that was almost the living embodiment of the term Narrow. It was so Narrow in application that it was used for one thing and one thing only, and that thing was to sit in Sideboards and allow you to pretend that having one in games 2 and 3 meant that you were favorite in the Dragonstorm matchup. You weren’t, but I, Patrick Chapin, and Makahito Mihara at various times were glad you thought so. Trickbind, flavor text ‘not enough.’
Almost done with the Blue then, and as you can see, there really was a ton of good and interesting stuff. Next up is Vesuvan Shapeshifter, a card that could really mess with your head, but at its simplest was a Brine Elemental repeatedly. Cards like Turnabout and even the ‘I’m so expensive you can’t abuse me’ Thoughtweft Gambit have always won games, and this happened turn after turn after turn(about). Another card that aimed to happen turn after turn after turn was Walk The Aeons. I’ll be honest and say that trying to ‘break’ marginal cards isn’t something that particularly ‘turns’ me on (see what I did there?) but a bunch of people really enjoyed the journey, and it’s great that there’s room in the game for cards like this.
Black
Now that I’ve had a nice cold shower after all those lovely Blue cards, I’ve towelled myself down and am now ready to try and say some nice things about Black cards. But first, an appeal. Curse Of The Cabal. Has anybody, anywhere on Earth, in any form of Magic, at any level of rules enforcement, managed to do something positive with this card other than propping up a squeaky chair leg? The artwork for this was stunning, so utterly mean and stark and brutal, and I’ve never heard a whisper of this being anything other than feeble. Somebody somewhere tell me that this won them a game. I beg you.
Okay, time for some good cards. Dread Return slotted neatly into all kinds of Reanimator strategies, including the absolute Extended behemoth that was Dredge. Haunting Hymn is a card like Ancestral Vision that has waxed and waned with the seasons as its casting cost became prohibitive or viable. This is yet another card that feels indelibly linked to the mighty Frenchman Guillaume Wafo-Tapa, and coming out of the Sideboard this decided plenty of mirror matches in Block. Come to that, I couldn’t suppress a grin seeing the Hymn resurrected by Mr. W-T at Grand Prix: Copenhagen. This is another example of a marginal card waiting for its time to come around, and it always surprises me that so few people actually rediscover cards like this and find a potent use for them, albeit at the margins of a format. Staying with cards in the margin we find Plague Sliver, a staple in Block Control decks out of the Sideboard, when time management was an issue. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, when I say time management, that’s a euphemism for ‘I played the mirror and took 43 minutes to lose the first game, so now I have to actually do more than rely on my 1 Urza’s Factory as a win condition, and holy wow Plague Sliver’s a 5/5.’
Leaving Constructed for a moment, there was high drama around the card Phthisis at Pro Tour: Geneva. With three of the Black uncommon in the Top 8 Draft, Takuya Oosawa faced American Mike Hron in the final. As we know, Phthisis Suspends if you want, but also just straight up costs seven. Facing down Hron’s Spectral Force, Oosawa sat with multiple Phthisis in hand, and six lands in play. My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I suspect Oosawa had three draws to find that land. But whereas in Prague twelve months earlier Oosawa emerged triumphant, this time it was the taciturn Hron who was the winner, grateful no doubt that Phthisis cost seven, and not six. Talking of not quite getting there, Smallpox excited when it first appeared, but despite a brief window of mild use, it certainly never caught on the way its progenitor did. Sometimes bigger is better, and that certainly applied to Urborg Syphon-Mage. Yeah, that’s probably quite a leap for some of you, what am I doing talking about an at-best Sealed Deck ok card? Well, as I said, bigger is better, and the Syphon-Mage belongs to a select group of average cards that became proper beatings when it came to more players in the game. Oh yes, if you were Drafting at Pro Tour: San Diego in the Two-Headed Giant Pro Tour, you really didn’t want one of these sitting opposite you, watching the life totals swing away from you faster than the 2007 Mets down the stretch (and it really pains me to say that).
We close out Black with three cards nestling next to each other in the official spoiler. The first two both contain the word ‘sudden,’ and that gives a clue to their use over the two years. By far the more popular, Sudden Death was an efficiently-named piece of no-messing removal, although perhaps they couldn’t find room on the card to call it Teferi’s Sudden Death, which would have been more accurate. Really, the mechanic was a terrific addition to the game, bringing a neat, strategic, non-brain-destroying variant on Interrupts to the environment, and I believe that when the Rotation actually occurs, one of the things deckbuilders will miss most is the idea that with Split Second your spell sticks, more or less no matter what. That certainty of forward planning is gone, and if you think I’m exaggerating, just imagine how different the world would look if ‘I Extirpate your Mystical Teachings…’ ‘No, you don’t…’ had been the norm. The other Sudden was Spoiling, one of the most brutal Sealed kickings imaginable, since it didn’t put everything in the bin straight away, it just guaranteed to put everything in the bin twenty seconds later as blocks aplenty destroyed board positions. And finally, a card that would find its full range and scope once Planar Chaos arrived and a certain Legendary Land took center stage in Block. Yes, Tendrils Of Corruption started out as a basically poor Sealed Deck removal spell that got upgraded to somewhere in the Limited Goodness region if you were prepared to Draft Black like a madman. Three months later it was one of the key components of one of the best Control Block decks from across fifteen years of Magic. Humble beginnings indeed.
Red
We kick off with a card that made some noise in Extended, and with good reason. Ancient Grudge was as cheap as things got when it came to really not liking Artifacts, and with a million and one ways to find Green mana as well as Red, this was card advantage pure and simple. Debate raged as to how many of these represented the critical number through which assorted Artifact strategies couldn’t fight. Whatever, 3 or 4 of these simply littered Extended Sideboards. A card that also saw Sideboard play was Bogardan Hellkite – that is, when players decided that three maindeck was enough in the utterly delicious Dragonstorm decks. Flash, a ton of damage sprayed around like confetti when it turned up, and then a simple smashing 5/5 flyer meant the dragon did great things. The only trick was to work out how to get him into play without taking eight turns to do so, like plenty of people did in Sealed. Whilst Dragonstorm was the first way to ‘cheat’ the manacost (although you could theoretically argue that you needed more, not less, mana to get one into play) another breed of decks grew up, collectively known as Mana Ramp, which basically played everything going that could accelerate your mana into enormous monsters like Spectral Force and the Hellkite. As recently as Grand Prix: Copenhagen, Standard players were finding new slots for the massive dragon, making him a kill mechanism in a highly old school Blue-Red counter-burn deck. As clocks went, you could set your watch by him, Temporal Isolation trickery notwithstanding.
Another card with a fascinating history is Empty The Warrens. To begin with, players tried to work out whether you’d ever get as far as making four guys in Sealed, what with four mana being pretty much an entire turn. And was four 1/1s that great anyway? Then Draft came along, and in triple Time Spiral the Empty deck was a totally viable mainstream strategy that was simply there in many, many drafts. Then, naturally enough, it became a kind of Plan B in Dragonstorm, where you made six or eight guys while you tried to regroup for a second wind. Then there was a similar use for it in TEPS, as you cast Burning Wish to bring it out of your Sideboard, made 36 guys, and gently enquired if they were running Damnation. All in all, this was an exciting and versatile card that could do incredibly powerful things, but still left you feeling vulnerable, or that you had a chance against it, depending which seat you were in. Sitting beside the Warrens was Grapeshot, the kill mechanism in the Aussie Storm decks that relied on a Storm count somewhere round about 5 or 6 in combination with Pyromancer’s Swath, which added two damage for each iteration of the 1 damage spell. Offhand, and I do mean having put approximately three seconds of thought into it, I can’t think of a better example of a little 1 damage spell being made to do such sterling work, i.e. where 1 damage = 27 damage or whatever. We’re still not done with Storm of course, with two more cards of note. Ignite Memories was an occasional maindeck choice, but basically a card that came out of the Board. The classic moment for the Memories came in the World Championship semi-final shootout between Gabriel Nassif of France and Patrick Chapin of the USA (and StarCityGames.com, of course.) Although Ignite cost a hefty dose of mana, against opponents running Bogardan Hellkites and Dragonstorms the damage stacked up very very quickly. and the last Storm card did no damage at all, at least not initially, yet it utterly locked up games in which it was played. Volcanic Awakening showcased the malevolent brutality available in the Two-Headed Giant format at Pro Tour: San Diego, since Storm counted for both players on the turn. This almost always led to total blowouts, as every copy was aimed relentlessly at one of the two opposing Heads exclusively, effectively turning the game into a 2-on-1 (and what’s not to like about a bit of hot 2-on-1 action?) carve-up.
Away from Storm, Red still had plenty to offer. En route to winning a Grand Prix title, Russia’s Nicolay Potovin had a titanic match with Oliver Oks in the semis, looking absolutely dead and buried to an avalanche of Kenji Tsumura tokens (don’t ask), before flipping up a Fortune Thief and riding it to victory turn after turn in a truly thrilling finale. Also instrumental in winning Grand Prix – at least two of them that I can think of – was the enormous and much-loved Gabe Walls, sorry, Greater Gargadon. Both finals involved the 2007 Player of the Year Tomaharu Saitou. In 2007 he defeated Raul Porojan in a Top 8 where, I kid you not, Saitou suspended Gargadon turn 1 what felt like every single game, to the point at which I wrote coverage of turn 1 while they were still shuffling! It was probably 4 or 5 times rather than the perfect X-0 to be fair, but let’s be clear, if Saitou can win using Browbeat, he probably needed Big Gargs on his side. A year later, and in Standard rather than Block, Saitou again found himself in a Grand Prix final, this time against Swede David Larsson. This time it was Saitou’s opponent who benefitted from the perfect turn 1 play. Already one up, Larsson stayed in the game, exhausted Saitou’s resources, and waltzed in unopposed for 9 points of smashingtons. Grand Prix: Copenhagen also reminded us that Magus Of The Scroll had turned out to be surprisingly robust in both Block and Standard at various points. Imagine this conversation:
Wizards of the Coast: Just imagine what would happen if some of Magic’s most powerful and best-loved spells came back as creatures. Just think – Cursed Scroll, Eladamri’s Vineyard and many more.
Player: Okay, I’ve imagined it. I’ve imagined a bunch of tiny monsters that just die repeatedly, since all the best spells are, you know, spells, and in what possible world do I want a power and toughness on my Cursed Scroll? These are all useless.
It’s certainly true that some of this cycle found little in the way of a home, but it’s also true to say that the ScrollMage (TM) did the business across multiple formats across two years. Now I loathe 1/1s that aren’t Looters in Limited or say Mogg Fanatic on them, but I can’t argue with the track record of this one. Fair play R&D, this guy was a perfect blend of power and vulnerability.
As far as burn spells went, Rift Bolt became a staple in all sorts of decks, in particular the Storm decks which loved the ability to plan a turn ahead with it. As a boardsweeper, Sulfurous Blast became crucial to an environment that had a ton of small monsters lying around, cluttering up the table. Sudden Shock occupied an interesting slot in the Worlds Metagame of 2006. At the time, Boros Deck Wins was massively popular in both Standard and Extended. In part, this was due to the fact that the deck was readily put together (featuring, as it did, so many cheap and cheerful cards from recent sets), but crucially it was also extremely portable between the two formats. At Worlds, not everyone comes prepared – this may shock some of you, I know – and the ability to swap a few cards about and – bingo! – a viable Extended deck, appealed to many. As Quentin Martin rather wryly pointed out, arguably the Extended version of the deck was strictly worse than the Standard version, since it ran Sudden Shock in place of Shock, needing the Split Second ability against assorted Extended nasties. Hmm, I’d like to pay twice as much for my Shock as I did two days ago please. Also from the Split Second stable, a staple of mono-Red Gargadon decks was Word Of Seizing, a Threaten/Unwilling Recruit variant that was extremely naughty when combined with your own Greater Gargadon. And finally, a word on Lightning Axe. Since I work with audio, I tend to pay attention to the noises people make as they play. I don’t mean grunts and wheezes, I’m talking about actual sound effects along the ‘bang, kapow, (noise of sizzling flesh)’ kind of thing. One of the clear winners in Time Spiral for this was Lightning Axe. You’d be sitting there facing down a Red mage, and they’d start rubbing their nose. Itch? Cold? Ah, yes, their shoulders would start to hunch, their head rolled back, they closed their eyes… ‘ah… ah…. a… a… aaaah… axeyou. Sorry mate, you’ve caught a cold.’ Such childish pleasures.
Green
I don’t remember Green getting the shaft in Time Spiral, but there’s no doubt that the color has my shortest list of spells to comment on in hindsight, and they’re by no means stellar as a group. Gemhide Sliver was mostly a straightforward mana accelerant. Clearly it was a component of any Limited Slivers strategy, but it also featured in the ultra-wacky yet cool Wild Pair Slivers deck. At this point in proceedings however, there was no sign that Slivers would be a Pro Tour winning strategy. As you might expect, Green has its share of mana ramp cards, and two more had impact. Search For Tomorrow slotted in neatly as a one-drop Suspend. It was especially potent in Block, but even with built-in delay it managed to make it in Standard too. Going into Pro Tour: Yokohama, I believed that the Pro Tour would be decided by Mwonvuli Acid-Moss. Initially a beating in Sealed, where greedy third colors were dispatched and screws were enforced, Mana Ramp was the natural home for a card that had a massive tempo swing impact. A Turn 3 Acid-Moss could leave you with one land in play on the draw, facing Spectral Force the following turn. Mana wasn’t meant to be 5-1 after only three turns, but that’s what the Moss did. Even so, the Mana Ramp deck of Sebastian Thaler couldn’t get beyond the quarter finals in Japan, with the control decks of players like Mark Herberholz and Guillaume Wafo-Tapa having amazing resilience. Since I’ve already mentioned it, let’s give Spectral Force the love it deserves. So often enormous Green men are disappointing, but you couldn’t say that of the Force, especially when combined with the tricksy Scryb Ranger, which negated the apparent downside of the 8/8 destroyer. Krosan Grip, thanks yet again to Split Second, made plenty of appearances out of Sideboards, offering versatility and reliability, two factors which frequently make for successful Constructed cards.
And you know what? That’s kind of it for Green. I can mention a few others, but I’m stretching. Squall Line was the card in the set that ensured plenty of Unintentional Draws, and the ‘Squall Line Shrug’ became a visible feature, as players hit the reset button and ensured that, if they couldn’t win, at least they could take their opponents down with them. In Block, an old school mono-Green beatdown strategy put in a moderately successful appearance, and that allowed for yet another Split Second moment. Stonewood Invocation. Dear God, were the words ‘big’ and ‘dumb’ ever better applied? Also taking power and toughness through the stratosphere was Tromp The Domains. On one memorable occasion, Kai Budde contrived to cast this au naturel on turn 5, and proceeded to reveal another in his hand to his bemused Draft opponent. Thing is, you wouldn’t have thought Kai needed the help… And finally, an odd little power and toughness booster that was a real sleeper, although describing it as influential is stretching things. Thrill Of The Hunt looked, smelled, tasted, and sounded like a Sealed Deck combat trick. Yet, as we’ve so often seen down the years, sometimes knowing that a card is sitting there just waiting to happen is a much more useful weapon than actually the card itself. Lying in the graveyard, Thrill really did make combat interaction problematic, and it gradually gained a foothold in Block. See? Green – not very exciting.
Gold
If you think Green was disappointing, you should check out the gold section. Of course, there weren’t many of them, and in a non-gold Block, it’s pretty apparent that they’re mostly designed for splashy Limited play. By and large the assorted slivers were individually rubbish, and gave minimal indication of their future uses. One of the rare gold cards gave its name to a breakout deck from Paris Worlds in 2006, the so-called Dralnu du Louvre, put together by, him again, Guillaume Wafo-Tapa. (Yes, that’s right, he pays me to put his name into every article. It’s viral marketing. Deal.) The ironic thing is that the UB rare was quickly dispatched from future versions of the deck, whilst continuing to retain the naming rights. Elsewhere, Mishra proved to be a fun way to spend an afternoon daydreaming about casual decks that might just sneak into a higher Metagame, while Saffi proved to be a proper chore when you really wanted to get things dead. On the Sealed front, and for 2HG, few cards dominated more than Kaervek. When it came down against you, most of the time you added up the two cards you needed to kill it, recognised you were about to go card advantage -1 and take 6 damage, and you shuffled up your permanents. He really was Merciless.
Artifacts
As you might expect, things get better here. I’ve never attempted to design a Magic card in my life, but it seems to me that finding the correct power level for Artifacts must be one of the toughest parts of the R&D tasklist for each set. They have no obvious colored flavor to guide them, they fit by definition into any deck that has mana in them (that’ll be pretty much all of them then) and not that many decks have automatic artifact hosers in their maindeck, depending on the Metagame. Mana acceleration is an absolute staple of artifactness, and Prismatic Lens has been a noble addition to that trend. Chromatic Star meanwhile went into TEPS in Extended, and belongs in one of the tougher trivia questions: Under Leyline Of The Void, which of Chromatic Star or Chromatic Sphere allows you to draw a card when they’re used?
(a) neither
(b) Star
(c) Sphere
(d) both
I don’t know about you (and I played TEPS that entire season) but if I’m on $500,000 with no lifelines, I’m walking away.
As far as power and toughness went, Phyrexian Totem provided both in spades, and mana in the meantime. The Phyrexian Negator drawback rarely seemed to kick in, since by the time it became live most of the opposition had been Controlled into submission. Another totem that left plenty of people saying ‘it does what?’ was the Weatherseed version. Seeing a 5/3 trampler coming at you was bad enough. You blocked and traded with it with your Durkwood Baloth. And then they made it the next turn. Scary, I’m actually shaking my head as I type this at the utter kicking this was in Sealed. Triskelavus fitted nicely into control decks as a finisher at Yokohama, and turned out to be quite handy with another card coming your way shortly, Academy Ruins. Finally, a little 0/1 with a weird and wacky ability that would find its perfect partner back in Coldsnap. Yes, Stuffy Doll was all very interesting on its own, but with a bunch of Snow-Covered Mountains and a Skred or two, it became the focus of a pretty successful deck, although I can’t immediately recollect it rising to the absolute top. That leaves us two more to mention. Frankly, one of them’s good, the other one isn’t. Locket Of Yesterdays. Lotus Bloom. Can you tell which one’s which? The Locket was a fun card that encouraged innovative deckbuilding, and the fact that eventually a few players managed, if not to break it, to at least tool it up to a pretty high level, indicates that it was a card with lots of intriguing possibilities. However, Lotus Bloom was a massive card, with one in your opening hand making you a big favorite on the play with Dragonstorm. A ton of mana once isn’t exactly subtle, but it’s always been entertaining (Dark Ritual, anyone?) but when people realised that Mind’s Desire let you get the mana straight away en route to Combo victory, that was just the icing on the cake. One of the cards that engendered genuine affection from those that used it.
Lands
And that just leaves the land. The previously-mentioned Academy Ruins formed a central part of the thirteen-mana Urzatron lock, involving 6 mana to cast Mindslaver, 4 mana to activate it and steal the opponents turn, and 3 mana to activate the Academy Ruins, putting the Mindslaver back on top of the library. And with Tower, Power Plant, and Mine, Urza had made sure thirteen frequently wasn’t an unlucky number. Gemstone Caverns had a neat and interesting design, and saw play in Constructed for approximately seventeen seconds during the two years it was available. The Flagstones Of Trokair had a neat little trick for White decks, with its Legendary status allowing for nice deck-thinning. The storage lands proved a superb addition to Constructed formats, with ‘end of turn charge’ becoming almost as prevalent as ‘end of turn Top’ at top tables. Red-Green mages looked to turn Fungal Reaches into massive Disintegrates, while Calciform Pools and Dreadship Reef both contributed mightily to the resilience of the control decks. But the most pervasive land in terms of its influence, though not the number of decks that played it, was Urza’s Factory. It seems amazing looking back that the primary win condition in a million and one control on control matchups involved tapping eight spare mana at the end of turn. That’s not eight mana, that’s eight mana leaving twenty-six open to fight a counterspell war.
Time Spiral Conclusion
I knew coming into this exercise that Blue was going to be powerful. I knew this because this is Magic, and I’m breathing, and for as long as both continue to be true, Blue will be powerful. I was still impressed by the full range at Blue’s command, however. It’s hard to be disappointed with White, since that’s what White does, but finding so little in Green doesn’t really chime with my impressions at the time. Part of me feels that Black only exists so that Blue mages have something to counterspell (unless it’s a gold set when they get to be Black as well, when it’s great) so it was no great loss to find not a huge amount to write home about. The big winner in hindsight is Red, with a collection of powerful niche cards, cards that came in and out of the Metagame as it ebbed and flowed, and a few that said ‘wow!’
So, to business. Let’s take a look at what cards we ought to keep at our disposal from Time Spiral. While the default position is four copies, I’ll stretch to eight where cards have serious utility or appear in multiple formats/decks.
Commons
4 Ancient Grudge
4 Cancel
4 Chromatic Star
4 Empty the Warrens
4 Fathom Seer
4 Gemhide Sliver
4 Grapeshot
4 Mogg War Marshal
8 Momentary Blink
4 Mwonvuli Acid-Moss
8 Mystical Teachings
8 Prismatic Lens
8 Rift Bolt
4 Search For Tomorrow
4 Temporal Isolation
8 Tendrils Of Corruption
4 Terramorphic Expanse
Uncommons
4 Brine Elemental
4 Calciform Pools
4 Careful Consideration
4 Dread Return
8 Dreadship Reef
4 Fungal Reaches
4 Griffin Guide
4 Haunting Hymn
4 Ignite Memories
4 Knight Of The Holy Nimbus
4 Krosan Grip
4 Locket Of Yesterdays
4 Molten Slagheap
4 Phyrexian Totem
4 Pull From Eternity
4 Riftwing Cloudskate
4 Scryb Ranger
4 Sudden Death
4 Sudden Shock
4 Sulfurous Blast
4 Urza’s Factory
Rares
4 Academy Ruins
4 Ancestral Vision
4 Bogardan Hellkite
4 Greater Gargadon
4 Lotus Bloom
4 Magus Of The Scroll
4 Plague Sliver
4 Saffi Eriksdotter
4 Spectral Force
4 Squall Line
4 Stuffy Doll
4 Teferi, Mage Of Zhalfir
4 Trickbind
4 Vesuvan Shapeshifter
In total there are 52 cards out of a total just below the 300 mark that you might want to keep hold of. I’ve left all the rares at 4-ofs, although it’s obviously debatable whether you ever need more than 1 or 2 Academy Ruins, but that’s at the margins of what we’re trying to achieve here. So let’s finish with a more ruthless pass at the list. Here’s what I reckon are your Time Spiral Essentials:
4 Ancient Grudge
4 Cancel
4 Chromatic Star
4 Empty the Warrens
4 Grapeshot
4 Mogg War Marshal
8 Momentary Blink
8 Mystical Teachings
8 Prismatic Lens
8 Rift Bolt
4 Search For Tomorrow
4 Temporal Isolation
8 Tendrils Of Corruption
4 Brine Elemental
4 Calciform Pools
4 Careful Consideration
4 Dread Return
8 Dreadship Reef
4 Fungal Reaches
4 Haunting Hymn
4 Ignite Memories
4 Krosan Grip
4 Molten Slagheap
4 Phyrexian Totem
4 Pull From Eternity
4 Riftwing Cloudskate
4 Scryb Ranger
4 Sudden Death
4 Sudden Shock
4 Sulfurous Blast
4 Urza’s Factory
4 Academy Ruins
4 Ancestral Vision
4 Bogardan Hellkite
4 Greater Gargadon
4 Lotus Bloom
4 Magus Of The Scroll
4 Spectral Force
4 Squall Line
4 Teferi, Mage Of Zhalfir
4 Trickbind
4 Vesuvan Shapeshifter
And what will that lot set you back? Somewhere round about the $250 range. Next week, we’ll look at the mysterious world of the Timeshifted 121, and take a wander through Planar Chaos.
Just before I go though, several of you suggested that I should list my Top 5 or something. Well, I can’t quite manage that, but I can tell you the Top 4. Unfortunately I can’t really split them, so it’s a four-way tie at the top:
1= 286
1= 287
1= 288
1= 289
Couldn’t remember the names, just know the collector numbers, you know how it is…
Until next week, as ever, thanks for reading.
R.