Pattern Recognition #110 - Time Spiral

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

30 May 2019

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Written by myself, berryjon, I aim to bring to my reading audience each week a different look into some aspect of Magic: The Gathering - be it an individual card, a mechanic, a theme, or even just general history. I am something of an Old Fogey and Smart Ass, so please take what I say with a grain of salt. I enjoy a good discussion on the relevant subject matter!

So, Time Spiral. I've made my love for this set, and this block quite apparent from the very beginning of this series. Enough so that I made of game of making an obligatory Time Spiral Reference in each article before I grew out of those.

This article will delve a bit into why I like this set, the reasons for its creation, its reception and why Modern Horizons is the rightful successor to this set.

Released on 06 October 2006, Time Spiral, along with the other two sets in the block (Planar Chaos and Future Sight) were developed under the teams leads of Brian Tinsman for Design and Brian Schneider for Development. They were given the internal call signs of "Snap", "Crackle" and "Pop", a reference to a certain advertising jingle that still comes around every so often. It was also a subtle reminder that the previous set was Cold_Snap_, an otherwise lonely set between blocks.

Time Spiral was what was considered to be a "Large" set, one with a full sheet of 121 Commons, 80 Uncommons, and 80 Rares. As this was before the days of Mythic Rares (which were introduced two blocks later, in Shards of Alara), if this set were published today, it would have 53 Rares and 15 Mythic Rares - less cards in total, but the printing sheet would be full.

By having 301 cards to work with, Time Spiral was able to make a good and honest effort to incorporate all the mechanics in the set, both new and old, and this ability to work with so many cards to develop mechanics is something that Wizards has seen the benefits of, and seeks to maintain as part of the lessons learned from this set and the ones surrounding it.

But speaking of mechanics, you could divide what this set offered into two categories. The first are the returning non-Evergreen mechanics from previous sets, and the mechanics inherent to the set and block that were developed for it.

Of the former, we got the last major instance of Echo, Buyback, Flanking, Storm and Shadow as mechanics outside of specialty products such as Commander or Modern Horizons, while Flash was formalized as an Evergreen Mechanic. In addition, we got Flashback, Madness and Morph, each of which made a return in a later set to help expand on the mechanic.

Now, you see this was all done because the greater theme of the block was that of Time, and Time Spiral was meant to represent the past of Magic. That is, mechanics were brought back from previous sets to give them new life and to remind people that they still existed and were viable. But believe me, this is not to say that these were Magic's greatest hits in terms of mechanics. Rather they were ones given a second chance to shine and some did while others faded right back into obscurity.

And rightfully so, I might add. Even I have trouble accepting the possibility of Flanking being a major part of the game, and Shadow was fine for a gimmick for a set, but making creatures mutually unblockable - unless they aren't - didn't help the game at all.

However, this attention to Time being the major theme of the set gave us our actual mechanics for the block, the ones around which the whole thing was built. Split Second and Suspend.

Now, while both of these mechanics are worth full articles in of themselves, I can give a quick summary of them here and now. Split Second is a mechanic that plays with the Stack, and is a callback to the old and obsolete card type of Interrupt. In the old days, this card type, once it was played, prevented the playing of all non Interrupt cards until it resolved. However, the formalization of the Stack made this ruling irrelevant and rightfully dead.

A spell with Split Second prevents all players from playing any spells or activating any abilities while the spell is on the stack. However, it is not perfect, as Triggered abilities can still go on the stack in response to the casting of the spell with Split Second, and abilities that don't utilize the stack can also occur. It's the reason why Willbender got reprinted in this set. But this ability was intended to be the final word in spells for a given stack, marking a cap to it before it could get out of hand. And for the most part, it worked like that.

The other mechanic, and one that appealed to me personally, was Suspend. This mechanic treated time itself, in the form of player turns, as a resource. When you played a Card with its suspend cost, you would exile it with a certain number of counters on it. During your upkeep, you would remove a counter, and when the last was removed, you would cast it without paying its regular cost, and if relevant, it would have Haste. Also, you would be casting the spell during your upkeep, ignoring normal timing rules.

Of course, you're still casting a spell, so don't think you can cheat your way around Arcane Laboratory by using this. As I had to realize when I build a Dimir control deck with the Laboratory in play when my Ancestral Vision resolved at once table.

And Suspend also gave us Jhoira of the Ghitu decks, so while it was confusing and interacted with cards in Exile, the mechanic could be quite powerful in the right hands.

Now, with this fixation on a theme, Time Spiral took this theme about being in the past to its logical conclusion in two different ways. The first and most important are the Time Shifted Cards. These were the first premium/specialty cards included in a booster pack, an ability that would, in recent years, be used to guarantee Legendaries, Planeswalkers or Double-Faced Cards in packs for sets that have such a thing in them.

These Time Shifted cards were reprints of past cards, 121 in total. These included cards never before printed in a real set, like Arena, cards that were powerful in their own way, like Lightning Angel or Mystic Snake, and The Rack or Nicol Bolas.

Yeah, it was because of this set that Bolas came back and started to be evil again. Don't let Wizards fool you into thinking that this was a new thing over the past couple of years. He's been Wizard's primary villain for 16 Years, just waiting for someone to come along and properly challenge him. So as much as I love this set and this block, that overgrown lizard with Delusions of grandeur is a stain on it.

Time Shifted cards came from Alpha through Mirrorden, which was the block that was going to be rotated out of Standard when Time Spiral came out, and they were in a way, the progenitor of the Masters sets - proper Reprints rather than collections of cards just tossed together like Chronicles was. In addition, they used the 'classic' Card frames, rather than the then modern ones of 8th Edition, helping distinguish new from old in the packs. After all, you are literally getting old cards in your packs! Huzzuh!

But no, the real callback was every last card in the set.

You see, every card in Time Spiral was a reference in name or ability (most times both) to a card that had been printed previously in the game. Ancestral Vision was Ancestral Recall, and given that the latter is one of the Power Nine, I still think this is the most iconic example in the set.

But everything is a reference in one way or another. Fortify is Shield Wall or Army of Allah. Amrou Seekers literally has Seeker attached to it. Ignite Memories is a one-shot Planeswalker's Fury - well in so much as it also has Storm as a mechanic.

Because of this, Time Spiral was intended to be something of a love letter to the previous ten years of Magic, and in that it did succeed in its own way. Time Spiral reinforced the themes of the past, but in doing so, didn't really tread new ground. It was the past, and while it did bring back to light many fun cards of old - and some not so fun ones.

I'm looking at you, Nicol Bolas.

Part of what makes this set so divisive amongst the player base was and is exactly that. It was so much of the old stuff, with the new stuff seemingly taking a back seat despite being right there. This appealed to the older players, but in exchanged, also partially alienated the newer players. This was compounded by the fact that the next two sets, Planar Chaos and Future Sight, all did the same thing.

Because of this, Time Spiral was rightly seen as a massive, curve breaking spike in the difficulty of the game, something that happened to reduce the number of new players while the old players stayed around. This is not something that Wizards wants, and as part of the results of this Wizards vis a vis Mark Rosewater himself, developed the new World Order, an internal set of rules and regulations meant to prevent this sort of player-hating complexity away from products that new players would be expected to buy into.

Complexity on the order of Time Spiral, this old school fan service for entrenched players like myself, can still occur, but not in one of the four regular sets each year. No, they can show up in supplemental products like Commander (where we got Phasing last year), and the Innovation product like Modern Horizons which brings back many of the same mechanics that Time Spiral did, but with a fresh new perspective that came with years of distance from the old sets and most importantly, no expectations that these cards had to be for new players. They could do Throes of Chaos, which is simply two words, two mechanics from different sets that when put together, could exceed the sum of its parts, just like the Time Spiral block did.

In the end, the success and popularity of Time Spiral comes about because it showed that Magic was a far deeper game than previously envisioned. Ravnica, the block before it, redefined what it meant to be multi-coloured, while Time Spiral took what was old and showed that it could be made new again. That there was still life in ideas and mechanics that many thought had fallen by the wayside in the past.

I love Time Spiral, I really do. I know that it is a flawed set, but a masterpiece in its own way. And seeing Time Spiral 2, also known as Modern Horizons? Well, I think I might actually buy into the Innovation set this year.

I mean, where else can I get my Snow fix?

Join me next week when I talk about something. I don't know yet.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!