Unlocking the Vault #23: “All I Need is a Miracle…”

In my last article, I discussed the Age of Creatures and how they’ve infiltrated Eternal formats like Vintage and Classic. Naturally, Wizards went out and spoiled this card from Avacyn Restored two days after I submitted my article:

Quick! Someone cue up Mike and the Mechanics! Also, is it just me, or is that Conley Woods in that video at the 4:48 mark? Anyway…

It’s easy to see why this card is generating so much buzz. The miracle mechanic has provided Wizards with the opportunity to print a conditional Time Walk. Clearly, no one in Classic will be casting this at full price, so it’s easy to focus on the miracle cost and see that this is Classic’s equivalent to a card from the vaunted Power 9 (ignoring the Time Spiral suspend cards).

So, the sky is falling, and we’ll all be racing to cast 4 Temporal Masterys in a row as soon as Avacyn Restored is available on MTGO, right? Not so fast. There are some significant hurdles to clear before we can visit Magical Christmasland, so let’s take a few moments to investigate the actual ramifications that this card will have for the format.

What can someone do with an extra turn?

This may seem elementary, but let’s try and put into context what an extra turn does. Here, I’ll go through what typically happens on a given turn:

Untap: Your lands and permanents untap, allowing you to play more spells and activated abilities that require tapping.

Upkeep: For Classic, this is mostly irrelevant outside of Dark Confidant (Bob) and Oath of Druids. For reasons I’ll discuss later, Temporal Mastery is a terrible card to pair with Bob, and if you Oath once, do you really need a second Oath trigger?

Draw a card: You get to draw a card for the turn.

Main Phase: You can play another land as well and use the lands that you untapped to play more spells, specifically sorcery-speed spells. Additionally, you can gain an additional activation for any Planeswalkers (*cough*, Jace the Mind Sculptor) you have.

Attack Phase: You can attack with your creatures again.

For the most part, those are the critical components of a turn that you can repeat when taking an extra one. Many cards let you simulate the effects of some of these components, but only a true Time Walk will combine them all into one. For instance, Explore simulates the draw step and additional land drop. Relentless Assault lets you untap your creatures and attack a second time. There are also several effects that allow you to untap your lands such as Sword of Feast and Famine and Turnabout as well as other “free” spells from Urza’s block.

Obviously, there are many things one can do with an extra turn. This is indisputable and the very reason that Time Walk has been restricted for ages in Vintage and banned in other formats. But what Time Walk does best is where Temporal Mastery actually fails: opportunity cost.

Temporal Mastery‘s restrictions make it very different from Time Walk, and it is for this reason that I don’t see this card breaking Classic (though to be fair, it teeters on the verge of breaking it and could break the format some day in the future with the printing of new cards– but I digress). The opportunity cost of Temporal Mastery is much higher than Time Walk.

Time Walk can be drawn at any time on your turn, be it as the second card of a Gush, or a mainphase Brainstorm. This can allow you to capitalize on an opponent tapping out or catch him off guard. Time Walk can also be sandbagged to use at a more opportune time, unlike Temporal Mastery which could get stuck in your hand. Time Walk can be scooped up by Bob, while Temporal Mastery cannot. Above all else, Time Walk doesn’t require you to play all of the extra library manipulation cards in order to get maximum value out of it.

Aside: Yes, Temporal Mastery can be cast on your opponent’s turn, so there is a slight upside to Temporal Mastery when comparing it to a Time Walk, but let’s be rational here. When you do decide to cast it on your opponent’s turn, you need some sort of instant-speed draw spell already in hand to do so. In addition, you need to be able to hold up at least 2 mana to cast Temporal Mastery and the draw spell (such as 3 mana for Brainstorm or 2 mana and 2 islands for Gush). This will save 2 mana on your free turn (since the lands will untap at the start of your free turn), but you lose the flexibility that your draw spell offers. It’s your choice to decide if the 2 mana saved is worth a card or not. –End aside.

Library manipulation toolbox

What is making a lot of people overreact to this card is the fact that Classic has a toolbox of library manipulation cards that are unrestricted: Brainstorm, Mystical Tutor, Jace, the Mind Sculptor, and Senseis Divining Top. In addition, there are also the restricted top-deck tutors: Imperial Seal and Vampiric Tutor. Temporal Mastery is also blue, so the worst case is that it “pitches to Force”. I will confess that that certainly is an awful lot of cards that can allow someone to manipulate the top of their library to ensure that they can cast Temporal Mastery for its miracle cost.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are several heavily played cards that do not work well with Temporal Mastery. Dark Confidant has a two-fold problem since Temporal Mastery has a converted mana cost of 7 and it also does not count as “drawing,” as the card is simply revealed off of Bob and put into your hand. Also, tutors such as Merchant Scroll and Demonic Tutor, which put the cards directly into your hand, are terrible with Temporal Mastery. Same goes with Fact or Fiction and Gifts Ungiven, which don’t see much Classic play these days, but it’s still relevant. As for other cards that are currently seeing a lot of play, Yawgmoth’s Will and Snapcaster Mage are never going to cast Temporal Mastery from the graveyard since, again, the converted mana cost is 7. Even if you manage to have the mana to cast Temporal Mastery from the graveyard, it would have to have been discarded or previously countered, as Temporal Mastery is exiled when it resolves instead of going to your graveyard. For the same reason, Noxious Revival doesn’t work too well.

Let’s all play with 4 Time Walks!

With all those cards mentioned earlier that work well with Temporal Mastery, naturally everyone will be playing the following deck, right?:

4x Temporal Mastery
4x Brainstorm
4x Force of Will
3x Jace, the Mind Sculptor
4x Mystical Tutor
1x Vampiric Tutor
1x Imperial Seal
4x Senseis Divining Top
17x Lands
14x Other

Well, that’s not a lot of open slots (14 cards) to combat opponents’ possible countermagic and other trump cards such as Tinker, Tendrils of Agony, dredgers, etc., and still have a finisher or two of your own. So, perhaps you tick down the number of Tops and Temporal Masterys by a couple, and that brings you to 18 relevant slots– still not enough in my book. So, the next logical thing to do is to start dropping the number of Mystical Tutors. Maybe you only need 1-2 of them to reliably hit Temporal Mastery when you want to. Now, you are up to 20-21 slots available. It’s starting to look better.

What, then, is your end game? Tinker? I’d much rather just Tutor up the Tinker and win on the spot. Are you beating down with creatures? You need at least 12 creature spots to draw them often enough to make an impact. That would leave you with only 8-9 other spots, at minimum. Are you trying to Time Vault-Voltaic Key to take all the turns to ultimate Jace? If that’s the case, then you’re probably just better off tutoring for Tinker again to grab the missing piece to assemble the Vault-Key lock. LED Storm decks don’t need to be durdleling around with Temporal Mastery since the slots in the deck are already highly tuned with Rituals and straight-to-hand tutors, so what then are you doing to actually win the game? You can take all the extra turns you want, but you need to have something to do with them.

Thus, it is my opinion that the only deck that will have much use for Temporal Mastery is ShOath. ShOath already plays 4 Mystical Tutors and with both Oath of Druids and Show and Tell dropping summoning-sick fatties onto the battlefield, there is actually something to do on the extra turn (it’s arguable, though, that GG Oath with Dragon Breath, would accomplish the same thing). That being said, I don’t envision ShOath wanting more than 2 copies of Temporal Mastery since their deck is highly tuned as is and can ill afford to lose too many slots.

Still not convinced? Let’s take a look at the popular decks that play with islands, which currently exist in the format and see what cards would be candidates for Temporal Mastery to replace:

On the surface, Delver decks would appear to be great candidates for Temporal Mastery. Delver decks are already stacked with instants and sorceries and would certainly welcome another sorcery like Temporal Mastery to help win the tempo battle. When you dig deeper though, part of what makes Delver decks so strong is their ability to seemingly counter every spell you throw at them. If you are going to add Temporal Mastery to a Delver deck, you’re likely to have to take out some number of counters, which in turn would weaken their power level against the broken decks in the format.

Landstill decks are built to play the long game. The premise is to grind out your opponent and counter all their threats until you can gain an edge in the board state. In the early to mid-game, Temporal Mastery would be nothing but an Explore. Late-game, taking an extra turn when things are already locked up is simply win-more. Add to that the fact that Standstill does not play nicely with Temporal Mastery, and this deck does not seem like a good candidate to play with the new Time Walk.

As I mentioned earlier, ShOath is well positioned to take advantage of Temporal Mastery since most of the library manipulation cards that power up Temporal Mastery are already found in the maindeck. Simply swapping out 1-2 cards to have access to a Time Walk seems like a no-brainer.

Turbo Jace/Tezzeret the Seeker decks are one of my pet decks. Even though I know that they are not ideal in the current creature-riddled meta-game, I still enjoy playing with the pseudo-”Planeswalker Ramp” deck. That being said, I don’t know how much value Temporal Mastery will offer these decks. While you are casting artifact spells to ramp into your planeswalkers, there isn’t much opportunity to manipulate your library to gain an extra turn, and the deck could not gain much value off an extra turn without a planeswalker in play. While using a free turn to gain an extra activation of a Jace or Tezzeret seems like a great idea, similar to Landstill, you should have the game already locked up at that point since you are either fatesealing their doom, ticking Jace up to his ultimate, or you’ve locked them out with Tezzeret and Time Vault.

Typical Blue Control decks running Tinker probably would rather tutor up said Tinker than durdle around with an extra turn.

Similar to Delver, Illusions is successful in that the pilot seemingly counters everything that you throw at them. Taking creatures out of the deck seems plain wrong, so Temporal Mastery could only replace some number of counters that make the deck work in the first place. On the surface, taking an extra turn sounds like a great tempo swing, but if they can’t counter your removal spell on their Lord of the Unreal because their countermagic density has dropped to include Temporal Mastery and topdecked tutors, the deck quickly falls apart.

Merfolk is a strange beast. On one hand, it’s essentially a Legacy deck with Strip Mine and Mental Misstep. I’m not that familiar with Merfolk since I don’t play Legacy, but I don’t see any real use for Temporal Mastery other than as a Relentless Assault and/or Explore. Maybe someone else can point out something that I’m missing here.

Here is another aggro-control deck. 4-Color Fish could certainly get value out of an additional attack phase or an Explore, but again, cutting cards from this deck likely requires that you take out threats and/or answers– basically, the foundation of the deck. Decrease the creature concentration and you’re susceptible to the mirror match and other agro-control decks. Take out answers and you’re going to be weak to the “broken” decks.

Example time!

Imagine you are playing a Delver deck and throw in some Temporal Masteries in place of some countermagic. Consider this opening hand on the play: Temporal Mastery, Brainstorm, Force of Will, Jace, Underground Sea, Misty Rainforest x2. Looks like a great hand, right? You play a Rainforest and pass the turn. On Turn 2 you draw Delver of Secrets, play your Sea and tap it to play the Delver and pass the turn. On Turn 3, you flip up Lightning Bolt to turn Delver into a 3/2 Flyer, draw the Bolt for your turn and attack with your Delver after playing your second Rainforest. At the end of your opponent’s turn, you Brainstorm revealing: Mana Crypt, Island, and a Polluted Delta. To set up an extra turn on Turn 5 (when you can actually use it and cast Jace on the same turn), you place the Temporal Mastery on the top of your library followed by the Crypt on top of the Temporal Mastery. On Turn 4, you draw the Crypt and play the Delta and the Crypt (so that you can cast the Mastery without having to crack a fetchland and shuffle your library) and pass the turn again after attacking with Delver a second time.

Turn 5 is looking like a great turn; you can cast Temporal Mastery, cast and activate Jace, attack with Delver, and on your free turn, activate Jace again and attack with Delver again. You’re well on your way to a dominating victory! You snap flip over your Mastery, gladly pay the 2 mana and…

Your opponent plays Mana Drain.

Uh, oh. Your hand consists of: Bolt, Jace, Island, and Force of Will. You can Force the Drain, but that will require you to pitch your Jace. In that instance, Temporal Mastery is simply Explore + Relentless Assault. That’s nothing to write home about now, is it? Let’s say that you let the Drain resolve, thinking that you’re going to be OK with a Delver and an active Jace. You crack your fetchlands to get the 4 mana to play for Jace…

Your opponent plays Force of Will.

Things have gone from bad to worse. You still have a Delver and he’s been beating your opponent down and after attacking this turn, they are at least down to 10 (9 from the Delver’s attacks and one from the Force), so you reluctantly pass the turn.

On your opponent’s turn, they cast a removal spell on your Delver (because they correctly note that you don’t have a Force since you would have used it to counter their Force) and resolve Tinker for Blightsteel Colossus.

You draw another Delver. Game over.

Talk about a blowout. There you were thinking that you were all set to go and lock up the game with Jace, Delver, and an extra turn. As they say, best laid plans of mice and men… What’s also wrong with that scenario? You were goldfishing your opponent up until they cast their countermagic. Assuming they were doing nothing until then (which is hard to imagine), you still couldn’t get any value out of Mastery. If you think this is a pocket case, think again. I bet that this would be all too common with some testing. Sure, maybe that Bolt could have been any other blue card, but then again, you were goldfishing, so either your opponent would have played some threats or would have had a grip full of countermagic.

Had that Mastery been any sort of countermagic, you could have used your Brainstorm to get some serious value by throwing away some unnecessary lands. And therein lies the problem for me: In almost every situation, I would simply rather have countermagic than Temporal Mastery.

Let’s try this from another angle. Mental Misstep is legal in Classic and currently many decks that play islands play at least 3, if not a full 4, in their deck. Last time I checked, Brainstorm, Imperial Seal, Vampiric Tutor, Senseis Divining Top, and Mystical Tutor all cost 1 mana. While you will likely have more library manipulation threats than they have Missteps, the tempo swing on just a single Brainstorm that you were counting on to get your Temporal Mastery out of your hand could be a key difference in the game. And, if you remember my point earlier, should you play with such a deck chock full of library manipulation cards, you probably don’t have enough countermagic to reliably stop your opponent from Missteping your Brainstorm or top-deck tutor (or countering their counter on your Temporal Mastery for that matter).

In summary, in order to fit Temporal Mastery and a bunch of non-Brainstorm library manipulation effects into current decks, you need to do one of three things:

1. Decrease the number of threats and/or finishers.
2. Decrease the number of counters and/or answers.
3. Decrease the number of lands.

It would be suicide to follow through on #3, so you are either decreasing your threats/finishers or decreasing your countermagic and/or threats. Aside from ShOath, which already plays those library manipulation spells, I’d much rather keep my threats and answers, please.

Conclusion

Maybe I’m missing something here, but I just don’t see this card breaking the Classic format. Don’t get me wrong: I would absolutely love to play four Time Walks in my decks. Unfortunately, Temporal Mastery is not Time Walk, so I just don’t see how that it will cause anything to be banned or restricted in Classic.

I’m expecting to get ripped to shreds in the comment section down below, which I’m fine with. I’m not writing this to be controversial or to be the anti-Chicken Little that can claim I was right when everyone else said I was wrong. These are my thoughts on the matter and I simply hope that I brought up some valid points that others may have glossed over in their excitement to finally cast Time Walk on MTGO.

If nothing else, should Temporal Mastery become the menace that everyone initially believes it will be and push out the creature decks, there will be serious metagame ramifications. It will cause blue-based control decks to fight against each other, which could lead to Workshops making a resurgence in the metagame. What better way to stop any library manipulation spells needed to cast Temporal Mastery than by making all of their spells cost 2-3 mana and their Time Walk cost 3-4!

One last thought on Temporal Mastery: It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a currently non-existent combo deck will emerge that can take advantage of chaining free turns together. Perhaps there is a Doomsday pile (beyond: Temporal Mastery, Temporal Mastery, Temporal Mastery, Temporal Mastery, Laboratory Maniac) that wins the game on the spot. While I’m not that talented of a deck builder, I just don’t see anything better than 4x Temporal Mastery and 1x Maniac. Perhaps someone else will.

enderfall
Clan Magic Eternal
Follow me on Twitter: @enderfall