Timmerian Fiends

Creature — Horror

Remove Timmerian Fiends from your deck before playing if you're not playing for ante.

(Black)(Black)(Black), Sacrifice Timmerian Fiends: The owner of target artifact may ante the top card of his or her library. If that player doesn't, exchange ownership of that artifact and Timmerian Fiends. Put the artifact card into your graveyard and Timmerian Fiends from anywhere into that player's graveyard. This change in ownership is permanent.

Legality

Format	Legality
Archenemy	Legal
Casual	Legal
Commander: Rule 0	Legal
Custom	Legal
Duel Commander	Legal
Highlander	Legal
Leviathan	Legal
Limited	Legal
Oathbreaker	Legal
Planechase	Legal
Premodern	Legal
Quest Magic	Legal
Tiny Leaders	Legal
Vanguard	Legal

Discussion (8)

Caerwyn on Cube idea, good or bad? …

11 months ago

Only from analysis, but I feel fairly confident in that analysis. Consider:

• The average ante card is likely to hit a land 42.5% of the time (17/40 - a fairly standard land base in Limited). Of those, you’re very likely to hit a basic land - which you could have gotten out of the basic box anyway.

• Even in a colourless heavy meta, your odds of hitting a colourless are going to be pretty low. The odds you hit a colourless card which also improves your strategy or also debilitates your opponent’s deck are pretty low (and the odds of debilitating your opponents deck being worthwhile for you - meaning you hit the card in game one or two - are even lower).

The odds just are not on the side of Ante being fun, and that’s before we look at the cards themselves:

• Amulet of Quoz either turns the game into a literal coin flip or is just exiling a single card from the top of an opponent’s library. Either it is a troll card if it resolves which can cause issues with folks twiddling their thumbs waiting for rounds to end or it is a mediocre mill card someone spent 6 mana for.

• Bronze Tablet - maybe playable. Maybe. It is a ten mana theft piece that allows your opponents to take something back from you. That means for it to be playable, you must be in the position where you can play a 6-mana artifact, and activate it (either that turn or by surviving a turn), have something on your opponent’s side worth taking, have nothing on your side better than what you would take, and be in a position where your opponent won’t just take back what you stole. There’s a lot of things that must go right to make the card playable.

• Contract from Below - Arguably the most powerful card ever printed in the entire game, this has no place in your cube. It’s just too good, especially in 40 card decks. Every time it is played, it is likely to be the game decider all by itself.

• Darkpact - interacts badly with the math above. Odds are nothing will be worth claiming from ante, making this a three mana card just sitting about doing nothing in your hand.

• Demonic Attorney - Really bad card with the above math. You’re spending 3 mana to very likely get something completely useless to you into ante.

• Jeweled Bird - One mana for something that can only recover a card you likely can afford to lose. It would feel great if you got unlucky with what you ante, but otherwise it is almost always going to be a dead card.

• Rebirth - Awful, awful card for limited. This stretches out games and can interfere with the timing of rounds.

• Tempest Efreet - Again, the math is bad for this card, particularly since you’re going into an unknown zone and your opponent goes into the choice with perfect knowledge of their risk.

• Timmerian Fiends - In an artifacts matters cube where there is heavy artifact recursion, this might be playable. Still, it requires a very specific set of circumstances for someone to draft into and make it worthwhile.

I should probably add the caveat that some players might find it fun, even if the math makes it very, very clear that the Ante cards are all traps (excepting Contract, which, again, is just too darn good).

Caerwyn on None

4 years ago

I am on my phone, and did not feel like formatting a card response via mobile, so I’ll respond to your question here.

The “remove if not playing for ante” cards fall into two categories. The first involves the ante zone, which is as you described - the winner keeps all the cards in that zone. The second is ownership changing effects - there are two cards, Tempest Efreet and Timmerian Fiends that allow you to become the owner of another’s card. Ante was removed from the game pretty quickly as it runs afoul of many gambling laws - we only ever had the Ante Nine printed.

Notably, the single most powerful card draw spell, by an order of magnitude, ever printed is an ante card - Contract from Below .

SynergyBuild on What cards do MTG players …

5 years ago

God that Contract from Below power!!

Timmerian Fiends :D

I played a list that went infinite casts of Demonic Attorney and then passed to let the opponent draw a card and instantly took their entire deck. The deck ran other insane cards too, but I just love that I can take someone's deck. Forever. Legally.

Caerwyn on How does this Act of …

5 years ago

Dimir-Acolyte - As this has been open for a couple days, I've marked Boza's post as the accepted answer to this thread. In the future, if you could please hit the "Mark as Answer" button that shows up on responses once you're question has been resolved, that would be appreciated. It helps keep the Rules Q&A section organised and serves as allows future users who stumble across the same question to easily locate the answer.

---

TypicalTimmy

"Ownership refers to who's card that deck came from."

This is a good general way to understand ownership, but is not 100% accurate--there exist two exceptions:

Ownership also includes cards that are brought in from outside of the game--such as with Glittering Wish. This seems pretty obvious, but, technically, these cards do not have a "deck they came from" so do not neatly fit in your definition.

There also exist four cards that allow ownership to change, regardless of whose deck the card started in--Bronze Tablet, Darkpact. Tempest Efreet, and Timmerian Fiends. Granted, all of these cards are banned in every format, not welcome at kitchen table, and possibly in violation of local gambling laws, but they're still worth mentioning as a historical curiosity.

kamarupa on Out of Stock. o- ~ : ~ -o

5 years ago

So Stitch Together (and Timmerian Fiends aren't Modern legal. - So you'll have to decide whether you really want to go Modern or Legacy or budget/casual Legacy. If you go either of the Legacy routes, Diabolic Servitude is probably the card you're after. That or Exhume. However, if you're looking to to do a 'Buried Alive' in Modern sort of build, that's going to be a little more difficult. It won't be a very viable deck in Modern if you're only able to put high CMC creatures from your graveyard on top of your library (especially without a great mana ramp) - you're still sticking yourself with the mana cost, which really defeats the purpose of milling yourself out - there are plenty of tutor spells that can put a card into your hand for 5CMC or less (IE - Traumatize's cost). That is to say - there are more efficient means of putting a specific card in your hand. It's not that there aren't cards in Modern that can bring your creatures back from your graveyard to the battlefield, it's that their CMC is too high to make a good strategy in the format. You've just got to be faster. A few such spells, should you decide you want to explore your options: Immortal Servitude, Isareth the Awakener, Whisper, Blood Liturgist, Postmortem Lunge, Liliana, Death's Majesty, Gravedigger, Unburial Rites - there more - I'm sure you can figure out how to find some more.

Things that put stuff from your graveyard on top of your library are a dime a dozen - Mortuary Mire, for example, is cheap to buy for a reason. You need to be very specific about what you want your deck to do. It's easy to think you can do more than there's room for.

I feel obligated to let you know that what brought me to your deck is that this is one of the only Modern decks on Tappedout with painful quandry - a spell that is tantalizing in power and downright sour in CMC. There are so many cards like it in black, especially, and I'm particularly keen to see any deck that attempts to play them. I think there's no way around ramping into such high CMC spells and still expect to hit a wincon within Modern's turn/time-frame. Since there's almost no ramp in black and not in blue either, the best ramp option in is to run green. I'm not advocating for green here, only pointing out that it might be necessary, depending on what you want to to do. Keep in mind - I don't play control decks - I don't like them because I think they're reactionary, and therefore prone to limitations in responding to threats are instant speed. Just my take.

RazortoothMtg on Pattern Recognition #14 - Formats

7 years ago

I know about ante, and i'm not even really an Old Fogey, mostly because of picking up a couple Timmerian Fiends from someone because I like old cards.

ErebusX on Gatewatch format

7 years ago

1.) In this casual, multiplayer format, you start with a life total of 30 (rather than the usual 20) and choose a Planeswalker (or legendary creature that transforms into a planeswalker) to serve as your General. You then choose cards to match your Generals color identity to build your deck. A card's color identity is any mana symbol appearing on that card.

2.) The Gatewatch deck contains 65 cards: 1 General and 64 others. Your deck may contain only one of any individual card, with the exception of basic lands.

3.) The General enters play in the general zone. You may cast your General from the general zone for its normal costs, plus an additional one mana for each previous time it's been cast from the general zone this game. If your General is ever headed to the graveyard or exiled, you may return it to its general zone instead.

4.) All cards, including your General, must have a Converted Mana Cost (CMC) of 6 or less. In the case of cards with X in their mana cost, X = 0 for the purpose of calculating CMC for construction purposes.

5.) In addition to the normal Magic win conditions, you can win in this format by raising your General's Loyalty to 30 or higher. If recast from the general zone, your General's loyalty always resets to its base value.

---

Banned List:

Advantageous Proclamation, Amulet of Quoz, Ancestral Recall, Backup Plan, Balance, Black Lotus, Brago's Favor, Bronze Tablet, Channel, Chaos Orb, Contract from Below, Darkpact, Demonic Attorney, Double Stroke, Doubling Season, Erayo, Soratami Ascendant, Falling Star, Fastbond, Gideon, Champion of Justice, Gifts Ungiven, Immediate Action, Imprisoned in the Moon. Iterative Analysis, Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Jeweled Bird, Library of Alexandria, Limited Resources, Mox Emerald, Mox Jet, Mox Pearl, Mox Ruby, Mox Sapphire, Muzzio's Preparations, Painter's Servant, Panoptic Mirror, Pithing Needle, Power Play, Primeval Titan, Prophet of Kruphix, Rebirth, Recurring Nightmare, Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary, Secret Summoning, Secrets of Paradise, Sentinel Dispatch, Serra Ascendant, Shahrazad, Song of the Dryads, Tempest Efreet, Thief of Blood, Time Vault, Time Walk, Timmerian Fiends, Tinker, Tolarian Academy, Trade Secrets, Unexpected Potential, Upheaval, Vampire Hexmage, Worldknit, and Yawgmoth's Bargain

Rhadamanthus on Commander Legality Question

8 years ago

Note that any cards banned in Vintage are also banned in Commander, though they don't specifically appear on the Commander ban list. This includes "ante"-related cards (Jeweled Bird, Timmerian Fiends, etc.), physical dexterity cards (Chaos Orb and Falling Star), Conspiracies (Backup Plan, Muzzio's Preparations, etc.), and Shahrazad.