The Spiraling Shape Will Make You Go Insane

So, yeah, Time Spiral is out.

How does everyone feel about that?

I’ll say that my reaction to it (though not necessarily my experience with it) has not been overly positive.

There are some really cool cards. Magus of the Disk (a.k.a. Magus of the Flava Flav) is awesome. Nevinyrral’s Disk is one of my favorite cards ever, and its Magus gives it one or two legs to stand on. In fact, the whole Magus cycle is pretty slick. Disk, Jar, Scroll, and Mirror are all amazing in their own ways and will probably be used to someone’s benefit at some time. And we never got to use it, but we had a Magus of the Candelabra in Jeff’s deck ready to fuel my deck up for another go-round or to drop a huge fattie early.

Slivers are back; that’s neat. They always seem a lot better on paper than they are in practice, though. Except maybe for Sedge Sliver and Plague Sliver, though. Them guys is big and mean. Sedge Sliver got previewed on the MtG site as an effectual reprint of Sedge Troll, but Plague Sliver…

Plague Sliver
2BB
Creature – Sliver
Slivers you control get, “During your upkeep this creature deals one damage to you.”
5/5

If’n I’m not mistaken, that guy’s Juzam Djinn. If only the art were as cool.

There are fungus among us too. Now, a lot of you won’t have experience Thallids as thoroughly as I have. Back in the day, Jeff played Thallids constantly, with a passion. The full suite: Elvish Farmers, Thallids, Thorn Thallids, Gaea’s Cradles, and Killer Bees. Needless to say, there were a lot of creature standoffs. And now they’re back, and better than ever. Deathspore Thallid is now one of the hardest names to say without sounding like Sylvester the Cat. Even plain ol’ Thallid made it back as a Time Shifted card.

Buyback, Echo, Flashback, and Madness all make appearances to varying frequencies. They’re all, um, different ways for you to spend your mana every turn. I guess that’s pretty cool. I never really played a lot with them. I’ve only ever flashed back Recoup and Deep Analysis, and even though I have them, I don’t know that I’ve even madnessed out a Basking Rootwalla. So, uh, give or take on these abilities.

Time Shifted Call of the Herd was pretty good for us in the 2HG tournament, though. Jeff played and flashed that back almost every game!

Rebels are back too! I didn’t use them before but they sure were good now. That Seeker guy (who costs less than actual Seeker and comes attached to a creature) is pretty good, for example. I mean, let’s hope they don’t get out of hand like last time, but that’s cool, right?

Shadow’s back. Everybody loved that mechanic because it had the chance to make creature battles completely irrelevant. At heart, Magic loves its creature battles, so there’s really nothing better than removing them from the game. You might as well play Vintage.

Speaking of Vintage, Storm is pretty cool. That’s in Time Spiral too, both in Time Shifted form and not. Remember when Dragonstorm was the hot new card on the block? Me either! But now you can play that in Standard again, with Rite of Flame to power it up!

Morph is back.

Flanking is back.

Spitting Slug is back.

Spellshapers are back.

Cycling, Kicker, Incarnations: back, back, back.

The Rack is Back.

Enchantments that return to your hand if they go to your graveyard from play—they’re back.

Rampage is back! Rampage!

Time Spiral is the least unified, least intuitive set in recent memory. I dislike it greatly. It seems like Wizards just got a bunch of their old Timmy players together in one room, got drunk, and went through boxes of old cards.

“DUDE! Remember Lord of the Pit? That guy’s AWESOME!”

“DUDE! Five citizen tokens! Badass!”

“DUDE! Remember that time I smashed your face in with Craw Giant? Like, you kept trying to block, but he just kept getting bigger and bigger!”

“DUDE! I just needed to hold you off until my Nevinyrral’s Disk untapped!”

“DUDE! I totally would have Capsized that back to your hand, AND THEN BOUGHT IT BACK!”

“DUDE!”

“DUDE!”

“AW MAN! What smells like rotten eggs?!”

I already hate that brainstorming session and there’s beer involved, which means it must be awful.

Really.

Coming off of Ravnica block, which was exquisitely designed and themed, Time Spiral just seems random and Frankensteinish. There’s so much going on in this set, and there’s a lot of it that doesn’t really seem to play well together just because there’s not enough of any of it to be worthwhile.

Clearly, Wizards and players don’t want to suffer the problems of previous blocks and things like UG Madness or Rebels, but I don’t think throwing everything into one vat like some twisted Magic goulash is the right answer either. It comes off as being completely asinine. As though Wizards skimped on the development of the set just so they could do more throwback cards that old players would connect with.

And maybe that’s the problem.

It’s clearly an attempt to lure older players who have quit back into the game by saying, “Hey, remember when you played this and loved it? It’s back and costed more fairly!” Or even, “Hey, remember when you played this and loved it? It’s back, rarer, and has a cool new purple expansion symbol!”

Are former players really that dumb? I hope not.

Storm is a cool and powerful ability; Merfolk, Thallids, and Kobolds are cool creature types; and Urza’s Factory is an awesome non-basic land, but I really don't think that former players are going to leap back into the game head first for a long period of time just to play this one set.

Plus, I definitely take issue with some of the Time Shifted cards.

Why?

I understand that Serrated Arrows was played in Type 2 when it was “Home-dicapped,” but that’s because everything else sucked! Hey, at least Arrows can kill pump knights! What insane brokenness were you going to fetch with Merchant Scroll back then? Jilt?

So now players get to play with Spitting Slug again?!

Really?!

OMGOMGOMGOMGBBQ!

I have to change pants!

War Barge! Are you kidding? The “I Peed In Your Mana Pool” Deck is now totally viable again!

Wall of Roots! I could totally play that again if they hadn’t errataed it and get infinite mana!

Uncle Istvan! I’m pretty sure I put him in my two-hundred card black, red, green deck when I was a total noob! He’s not completely outclassed by everything else now at all.

Giant Oyster! I love Homelands soooo much! But… I’m pretty sure I can still get packs of that for a dollar.

Coalition Victory! Finally another chance to play Domain!

Then, at the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got things like Avatar of Woe, Akroma, Shadowmage Infiltrator, Disenchant, Desert, Psionic Blast, Prodigal Sorcerer, and Stormbind that aren’t exactly broken, but they’re extremely powerful or out of flavor for anything R&D would create now. Prodigal Sorcerer and Psionic Blast is red. Akroma and Avatar of Woe win now. Desert is awesome.

You have these on top of the insanity that Time Spiral dishes out. Four-hundred twenty-two new cards with at least twelve returning abilities, that’s not confusing at all!

Now, I’m not going to say that this set is the harbinger of the end of Magic. I’m sure Wizards put plenty of time and effort into the development of this set and that it’s not quite as retarded as I make it out to be above. I’m sure that, not only will there be future sets (because I’m sure their marketing ploy will work to some degree) Something just seems off about how everything worked out.

Plus, I never would have realized this if I hadn’t played it some myself at the prerelease. Looking at the spoilers, I was caught up too in the excitement of the references to old cards. Sarpadian Empires Vol. VII is a great, flavorful name for everyone who played when Fallen Empires was legal and in stores. When you play it, though, you get the feeling that all the decks are forced together just by color.

I guess in that way, it really does feel like the deckbuilding we did a decade ago. “These cards are all black or red! They go in the black and red deck. These green ones go in the box of stuff I’ll trade.”

I really hope that’s not the effect they were going for.