2014 Update: The Ten Most Desirable Magic Cards, According to Gatherer – Part Two

“The potential for change lies in all things. Know a thing’s nature, know its possibilities, and know it anew.”

—Gustha Ebbasdotter, Kjeldoran Royal Mage

In Part One our 2014 update of the Ten Most Desirable Magic Cards, According to Gatherer, we witnessed seven cards do their best Volrath the Fallen impressions.  They stepped out; they did not step down.  Meanwhile, six cards moved up the chart to take their place.  Somehow, that leaves us with six more cards to talk about in the new top ten.  Math is a lot like Christopher Walken, in that it can be both irrational and right.

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Number Six – Time Vault

Let’s look at the Oracle wording for this card, shall we?

Time Vault enters the battlefield tapped.
Time Vault doesn’t untap during your untap step.
If you would begin your turn while Time Vault is tapped, you may skip that turn instead. If you do, untap Time Vault.
: Take an extra turn after this one.

So… this card taps to give you an extra turn.  But you can’t use it until you forfeit a turn first.  Well, okay, I can see how you could take advantage of this.  For example, if your opponent cast Wrath of God, and you don’t have anything interesting to put on the field, you can skip your next turn and save it for later when the game state is more complex.  I’m not sure if that effect is worth drawing a Time Vault over another card, but at least its cheap enough.

Hmm… wait a second.  That’s clearly  the way the card was intended to be used.  But what prevents a player from untapping Time Vault with another card…?
…

What prevents a player from untapping Time Vault with another card?!

Nothing, evidently.  Have a Twiddle?  Take another turn.  Have a Voltaic Key?  Take all the turns.  Time Vault was printed with the rest of Alpha in 1993.  Due to its interaction with Animate Artifact and Instill Energy, it was the first card banned for power level reasons in 1994.  That was a terrible blow.  In those early days of Magic, Wizards didn’t want to ban anything.  Why would you print a game, then tell people that there were cards in the game they couldn’t play with?  So, in 1996, Time Vault received power level errata.  When you untapped Time Vault, you put a time counter on it.  The last line of Time Vault now read “Remove a Time Counter from Time Vault, : Take an additional turn after this one.”  People could play with the cards they payed for!  Problem solved.

Except, not really.  Because the card doesn’t say any of that.  When you look at it in a vacuum, adding, then removing counters from Time Vault is the best solution to this problem.  But that sets a precedent.  It tells people that we’re okay with changing what the card says after printing it, as long as it serves the needs of the game designers.  Other cards, like Flash and Cloud of Faeries, also received power level errata to ‘fix’ their intended functionality.  Each time this was done, it seemed like a good idea.  And each time, the game became more and more confusing, as cards didn’t do what they said they would do.

In 2006, cooler heads prevailed.  No more power level errata.  Cards did what they said they did, and were either fine, or banned for being too powerful.  Time Vault was move to the restricted list in 2008.  And despite being the laziest two card kill combo in the game, it remains unbanned since 1996.

Best comment made by A3Kitsune: “Mark Gottlieb, the Magic Rules Manager at the time he said this is quoted as saying ‘For the sake of our sanity, we generally ignore the very existence of Time Vault.’ […]. That’s how broken this card is. No other card in the game threatens the Rules team’s sanity anywhere near like this does.”

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Number Five – Timetwister

I don’t feel a need to explain why Timetwister is a powerful card, since I spelled it out with her sister card Wheel of Fortune in The Ten Most Devastating Red Cards.  It’s the same dance, except blue shuffles graveyards into libraries before doing the seven card twist.

On the surface, that’s a minor distinction.  But I find it interesting how this minor change plays out philosophically between red and blue decks.  Red pushes the game forward, piling through resources as it tears up the board.  In your standard red deck, Wheel of Fortune encourages you to dump your hand and fetch a new seven as soon as you can.  If you can cast the Wheel with no cards in hand and catch your opponent with a full grip, then you’ve maximized your potential for damage.

Standard blue decks, on the other hand, don’t want to play out.  They want to stabilize the board with as few resources as possible, then control through well placed counterspells, often culminating to a crucial Control Magic.  Since blue is playing for the long game, it could potentially play Timetwister with two cards left in its hand, and its opponent with one.  Blue can’t take a chance that the opponent will top deck a game breaking monster, so it needs to give away card advantage if that leads to drawing into a crucial counter.  Since blue is seeking parity while playing the long game, it needs to be careful not to draw out the deck; or, it would, if Timetwister didn’t replenish the library with more answers from the graveyard.

When Richard Garfield designed these two cards, did he realize the subtle choices he was playing with?  Or did this pull together by accident?  Was the distinction between the two cards created organically, through playtesting?  Was the clause added to Twister due to a deckbuilding need, but non-consciously left off Wheel of Fortune because nobody thought to put it there?  Or was Richard intentionally saying something to the players about the role of red versus blue through a subtle line of text on a couple of rares?  I don’t know.  If it was the last one, though, then that was a very clever.  Sometimes, I’m miffed by how far-reaching Garfield’s original design is.  How many people design a game that lasts for decades, spawning expansions four times per year?  When you look at some of the original cards, it’s fascinating to find cards primed to do just that.

Best comment made by AlphaNumerical:  “[T]his will irrevocably damage Stax, and completely shut down Ichorid, two popular Vintage mainstays. This will downright hose any graveyard/recursion based deck, and it is more than just an incredible sideboard for decks like Fish. It is one bomb that refills your hand and shuts down your opponent in one go.”

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Number Four – Time Walk

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.  A man walks up to Richard Garfield.  He says, “I’ve been playtesting your magical cards.”

Richard says, “You’ve been testing my cards?”

The guy says “Yeah.  And I got to admit, I’m not too good at the game.  In fact, I’m positively rotten.  But last week, I got this great card.  I play it and I win.  It doesn’t matter what my opponent does.  If they don’t counter it, they lose.”

Richard says, “Oy!  I don’t remember designing any card like that.  I’m not even sure what that would cost.  Maybe thirteen black mana?”

“Nah,” the guy says, “it costs a colorless and a blue.  Look, I got it right here.  It’s called Time Walk, and it reads, “Target player loses next turn.”

…and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Time Walk now reads “Take an extra turn after this one.”  True story, too, if we’re to believe Richard in The Pocket Player’s Guide for Magic: the Gathering.  We can thank that random gentleman for accidentally making Magic, and a number of other games that patterned their rules off Magic, a better game.  There are few things in any multiplayer match more frustrating that losing a turn.  Just one player taking an extra turn, though?  That’s fine.  All of my opponents taking an extra turn?  Somehow, I find that less invasive than losing a turn, even if its the same damn result.  I don’t know.  It’s how my mind works.

But getting back to Time Walk.  So… what’s up with that casting cost?  Normally, I dodge talking about the cost since it makes for boring, repetitive writing.  Good cards are good because they cost less.  Bad cards are bad because they cost too much.  Yadda Yadda Yastrzemski.  You don’t need me for that.  But Time Walk’s cost is so absurdly low, you can’t help gawk at it and wonder what happened.  Maybe every time someone went to correct the casting cost on this card, they got sucked into the Amy Weber art, and forgot what they were doing?

I mean, four years later, Wizards would print Time Warp and that card would become a tournament regular.  Time Warp’s Gatherer rating is 4.500 out of a potential 5 stars.  Time Walk costs two and a colorless less.  Could you imagine if Liliana Vess cost ?  What if Mirari’s Wake cost ?  Siege-Gang Commander?  Plow Under?  What if you got rid of the cumulative upkeep on Ronom Hulk and cost it at ?  Oh wait, I’m sorry.  That last one is Tarmogoyf.

Or, if you want, you can think of Time Walk as the best cantrip in the game of Magic.  For , you draw a card, and for , you fire off all your upkeep effects, activate your planeswalkers an additional time, get an extra attack step, a bonus land drop and untap all your permanents.  That sounds fair.

Best comment made by SlackWareWolf:  “The first time I played the owner of the shop I played at, it wasn’t restricted, so he popped out like 7 of these things in 3 turns and I lost to a Prodigal Sorcerer.”

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Yawgmoth’s Will Was Number Three – Now Number Three 

It’s nice to see a constant every now and then.  One and a half years ago, I complemented the community for recognizing Yawgmoth’s Will’s power.  Most people don’t play Vintage, so it’s easy to imagine players who never heard of Yawg Will, or how it thoroughly upends games.  I’m sure many of players who voted five stars didn’t consider what happens when you combine this card with Dark Ritual, or that many Williams will win the game by exploding their graveyard all in one turn.  I guess it doesn’t matter, though.  Even if you don’t know the most efficient ways to exploit Yawg Will, it’s obvious that it deserves all the stars.

I suppose the real question is, if players not in the loop see how destructive this card is, how come Wizards missed it?  It’s scary to think of the vacuum Wizards was in in 1998 to think this card wasn’t a threat.  It’s a world that hearkens back to the two dominant strategies that existed at the time:  Bertrand Lestree’s ‘Use the most efficient tools for their mana cost and crush your opponent before they can recover’ strategy in his Zoo deck, and Brian Weisman’s ‘Card advantage is the only thing’ strategy he employed in ‘The Deck’.  With those two dominant theories, it’s easier to see how Yawgmoth’s Will could be seen as an outlier.  In the Zoo deck, Yawg Will could be used as a way to recover in the late game, but it doesn’t do anything for those crucial first four rounds when Zoo players dictate the matchup.  Likewise, Yawg Will is a questionable choice in ‘The Deck’, since casting Counterspell at sorcery speed is useless.  Yawg Will supplies a fifth Wrath of God for seven mana… but you’re better off sticking a Jayemdae Tome and getting your card advantage that way.

Squinting like that, I can see why Wizards wouldn’t understand that this card is more broken than a sun room full of first generation XBox 360s.  One look at the Necro decks, or Pros-Bloom, though, should have alerted Wizards that Magic was more than two competing theories, and a handful of outlying cards.  Urza Block contains more banned cards than any other block in Magic.  It seems fair to say that the six designers and developers for Urza block didn’t understand their game as well as the real world did.

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Ancestral Recall Was Number Four – Now Number Two

If Time Walk is undercosted, what does that make Ancestral Recall?  Because Ancestral sits somewhere between Concentrate and Opportunity.  By rights, it should cost a full more.  And I can guarantee you that if that card was printed, it would be tournament ready.

Ancestral is too cheap for the majority of games, never mind Magic.  I don’t know any game that pretends to incorporate a sense of balance, but also lets you draw three for one, for the cheapest cost possible, as soon as the game begins.  It’s like drawing a territory card in Risk that says “Sacrifice a unit to draw three territory cards.”  It’s loading the bases in a game of baseball before your first batter steps up to the plate.  It’s like being on Wheel of Fortune, spinning the wheel, landing on a tile which reads “Lose $100,” and Pat Sajak saying “Who put that joke tile there?  Ah, screw it.  Here, have three Free Spins.  My children don’t respect me anymore, so what do I care?”

Huh.  Ancestral is the last card from the Power Nine to make the list.  So what card beat out the Nine?

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Mana Drain Was Number Nine – Now Number One

I agree, internet.  Mana Drain is nuts.  Imagine this scenario, for example:

Player One: Mountain.  Go.

Player Two: Underground Sea.  Go.

P1:  Mountain.  Go.

P2: Underground Sea.  Go.

P1:  Mountain.  Magus of the Moon?

P2:  Mana Drain.  Untap, draw.  Play a Swamp and tap out.  Cast Frost Titan and lock down a Mountain.  Go.

That, by the way, is the sort of thing Mana Drain does before getting a cup of coffee in the morning.  Counter the opponent’s crushing threat, flip open today’s newspaper, help crash a giant monster on the table, scan the headlines while bringing the mug next to its lips.  Sip.

Mana Drain provides the answer (counter a twenty point Fireball), and serves the wind-up (add twenty-one mana to your pool.)  The only thing it doesn’t give you is the inevitable punch.  But complaining that any one card in a collectible card game doesn’t single-handedly provide you victory is like acknowledging that Hulk Hogan is a twelve time World Wrestling Federation Champion, a reality television prodigy, a scene stealing voice actor and a world class rap master, but complaining that he won’t be your personal friend.  Sorry, Hulkamaniacs, but there’s only so much awesome allowed into this world, and you’ve had your fill.  Likewise, Mana Drain players.  You need to supply your own Fireballs.

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