Flame Fusilade + Time Vault no longer functional on Monday, 4/24/06

[abisashi]

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/askwizards/0406

Will Gifts go back to Mana Severance-Goblin Charbelcher kills? That combo costs 2 mana more if I'm not mistaken (Severance + tinker + activate belcher vs Vault + Fusilade). I'd imagine the effect on Legacy will be greater.

Your thoughts?

[Machinus]

Q: "When cards are designed, they are tested to make sure they aren't too powerful, right? I read that Scythe of the Wretched used to give +2/+1, but had the toughness boost increased to prevent a two-card win with Triskelion. The rule I heard was that the designers try to not print cards that can generate a two-card instant win. With that in mind, when Flame Fusillade was designed, was the combo with Time Vault discovered? If so, why didn't this apply to the rule? Does the combo have to be Standard-legal to disqualify a card because of two-card 'I win' combos?"
--Sam
Oakland, California, USA

"Sam, you’re right about the effort we take to avoid game-ending 2-card combos. But no one in R&D saw the Time Vault-Flame Fusillade combo. There are a few reasons for that. 1) We generally limit our degenerate combo search to Standard, and maybe Extended if something jumps out at us. There are so many thousands of cards that we can’t do an exhaustive search, so Legacy combos aren’t a priority. 2) For the sake of our sanity, we generally ignore the very existence of Time Vault. 3) Time Vault doesn’t work like it’s supposed to work, so none of us anticipated anything like this combo.

"(For those who don’t know, here’s the combo: Flame Fusillade grants your permanents the ability ': Deal 1 damage to target creature or player.' Time Vault is an artifact with (among other abilities) 'Skip your next turn: Untap Time Vault and put a time counter on it.' So you could play Flame Fusillade, then tap Time Vault to deal damage, untap it by skipping your next turn, tap it, untap it, tap it, and so on. By the time you’re done, you’ll have skipped your next 20 turns, but your opponent will be fried to a crisp and in no real position to take advantage of your generosity.)

"But wait—didn’t I just say that the way Time Vault works is wrong? There are two problems with it. One is the cost of this activated ability. A cost can be spending mana, or paying life, or discarding a card, or various other resources you can spend. But a cost can’t really be spending something you don’t have yet. Magic doesn’t have a concept of debt. Look at Chronatog—It was printed with 'skip your next turn' as a cost, but that was changed in Oracle long ago so it’s now part of the ability’s effect. Time Vault should have been changed at the same time but wasn’t.

"The other issue is the original intent of its untap ability. Check out this ability from a different Vault in Alpha: 'Mana Vault doesn’t untap normally during untap phase; to untap it, you must pay 4 mana.' Mana Vault’s Oracle wording treats this ability like so: 'At the beginning of your upkeep, you may pay . If you do, untap Mana Vault.' This reflects the clear intent of the ability. Untapping this card at the beginning of your turn costs extra mana. You get to do it once, since it’s this card’s functional substitute for the 'normal' untap. Having this ability trigger at the beginning of your upkeep is the modern treatment of this sort of thing.

"These reasons are why Time Vault (as well as Brass Man, Colossus of Sardia, and Island Fish Jasconius) have all been given errata in the latest Oracle update (which goes live on Monday) to restore the original intent and functionality of their untap abilities. They’ll all be upkeep-triggered abilities that you can use once per turn. (Black Carriage and Marjhan aren’t getting the same errata because they were only ever printed with the activated version of their untap abilities.)

"This means the Flame Fusillade-Time Vault combo will no longer work. However, this change was not done to kill the combo. In fact, the existence of the combo is rather irrelevant. If a combo occurs naturally and is degenerate, our response would be to ban one of the cards, not change its functionality. But in this case, Time Vault and Flame Fusillade should never have interacted this way. Through years of Oracle changes and rules system changes, Time Vault drifted away from working the way it’s supposed to. It’s being changed because it’s the right thing to do for the integrity of that card."

The obvious response is to revert back to the configuration of previous versions of the deck, to look something resembling this:

-1 Flame Fusillade
-1 Time Vault

+1 Burning Wish
+1 Rebuild

However, I don't assume this is the only possible change to the deck. What are some other possible moves, and what are their merits?

I merged this with the general thread because it didn't have enough content to stand on its own.
-Jacob

[The Atog Lord]

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

I suppose cutting an easy two-card instant-death combo that costs six mana can't be awful for the game as a whole.
Guess my time vaults are going back to being only good for fun Stasis decks. Which is why I got them in the first place.

[pyr0ma5ta]

I was just about to post this.  Looks like people who spent money on Beta Vaults are SOL.  Frown.

[That0neguy]

Wow I came so close to buying vaults this weekend. Just last saturday someone started showing up to legacy tourneies with flame vault.  O well Personally I think its back to the tendrils kill sev/belcher is way too much mana.

[yespuhyren]

I was just about to post this too

Damn you for beating me

It definitely sucks to people who bought them for lots of $$.

Good thing for me is I'm all about REMOVING the flamevault combo from your decks with Jester's Cap

[Necrologia]

Yeah, I kinda figured I wouldn't be the first person to have posted this. Makes me glad I have a signed Severence again. 

[Disburden]

Good thing I play Meandeck Gifts!.

But seriously, this sucks that I bought Time Vaults a few months ago. I think I'll sell them soon. :lol:

[Marco]

Boo yah!

[Smmenen]

wizards just admitted that they have no integrity.

[Komatteru]

I doubt it has as much to do with the combo being degenerate.  Vault+Fusillade has failed to dominate or distort anything in either Legacy or Vintage.  It's more of a "This really isn't how Time Vault is supposed to work" type realization.  Brassman's deck was already functional without it, but the easy and cheapness of the combo made the deck a little better.  What I wonder about is how much that gain was necessary -- will the deck be too much weaker without it to solidify its hold as one of Vintage's most popular and consistant preformers?

I am surprised that they did something after going this long.  BrassMan + Quicksilver Dagger has been a fun combo for years, but now that one's in the shitter too.  They really should have done this to Vault when the combo was realized when the set was released.  That would have been a more "honest" solution.

[The Atog Lord]

I'd be much happier if they returned all cards to how they were printed.

Would Priest of Gix be so awful if he just added BBB when he came into play from anywhere? Does Great Whale really need to be played from your hand to get its bonus?

If WotC really wants to restore cards to their inital wording, there are plenty of places where they could do so. I don't mean cards like Camoflague that don't actually work under current rules; I mean cards which have been hit by errata to be functionally different although their old wording is perfectly valid.

[Roxas]

Don't forget about Severance Belcher.  Sure, it costs a ton more mana, but it's still a two-card combo kill.  I'm not sure it's better than Burning Wish -> Tendrils + Rebuild, though. 

[Smmenen]

Here is what I wrote to Mark Gottlieb:

"Integrity of the card"?  How about the integrity of the game?
Changing the errata on Time Vault 8 months after a particular usage
has become well established in Legacy and Vintage is shameful.  If you
wanted to restore the original intent, that should have been done at
the time of the restricted/banning announcements.  You blatently
permitted the market and the player base to assume that the combo was
considered fair and fine and have upended that expectation in a manner
worse than if you had just decided to restrict the card, since at
least restrictions occur at a particular point in time.

The existence of the combo is as "irrellevant" as the company's
no-reprint policy.  The combo and the no-reprint policy relate to the
integrity of the game as a collectible commodity.  Good job and
putting a huge dent in that reputation.  And this time, you'll not
only have pissed off the dealers, but a huge swath of players who
could  care less if you reprint power or not, but are going to be quite
irritated at this manuver, beginning with me.

[Tha Gunslinga]

Fuckin' OWNED.  I just picked up my third crimped Beta Time Vault (for a Beta Volcanic), so I'm feeling a bit of pain here.  I almost wonder if they thought Flame Vault was too degenerate to keep around?  Gifts is the best Type 1 deck in my opinion, and it had been dominating locally for the last month or so.

[Smmenen]

Speaking of cards that don't work as intended: what about Masknaught?  Shoudl we errata mask again too?

[Jacob Orlove]

Speaking of cards that don't work as intended: what about Masknaught?  Shoudl we errata mask again too?

This certainly sets a precedent for that to happen at any time.

[Tha Gunslinga]

Speaking of cards that don't work as intended: what about Masknaught?  Shoudl we errata mask again too?

Say goodbye to Dragon.

[Marco]

Say goodbye to Dragon.

That would be awesome.

[Komatteru]

To be honest, I think the Dragon is safe because no one wants to go remotely near that disaster.  About 90% of the judges I know don't know how the thing really works, and any attempts to fix that might make it overly powerful:

If you put a "if you played Bengorger Dragon from your hand, then..." clause on it, then it becomes a really, really powerful reanimation target -- much better than Akroma in fact.  You'd have to almost word it specifically not to interact with the animate enchantments, and that is against policy, since it's 3 specific cards.  Let's not get into how they fixed Great Whale, Cloud of Faeries, etc. because of Recurring Nightmare since that was back in do_anything_to_fix_this disaster.situation.

Although, this really does seem like an instance of killing an interaction with a certain card, since there's only one card that wins the game in conjunction with Time Vault.


As for Masknaught, they can't really revert the whole comes into play thing because of Morph.  If they ruled that creatures put into play with Mask trigger CIPT effects, then the same would have to apply for Morph as well, lest the rules be inconsistant.  They could go back to making it a spell (the original version made you pay the real mana cost but not reveal how you were spending it), but that would be a mess too.

[The Atog Lord]

Although, this really does seem like an instance of killing an interaction with a certain card, since there's only one card that wins the game in conjunction with Time Vault.

They were just after the Brass Cannon deck. Flame/Vault got caught in the crossfire, much like Long suffered because 4LED Madness was ruining the format.

[Lou]

Speaking of cards that don't work as intended: what about Masknaught?  Shoudl we errata mask again too?

This certainly sets a precedent for that to happen at any time.

This is certainly true.  I wonder if the market will take some kind of long term hit because of this.  Fuck, I can't even imagine how much of a price drop Time Vault just took because of this.

[nataz]

They were just after the Brass Cannon deck. Flame/Vault got caught in the crossfire, much like Long suffered because 4LED Madness was ruining the format.

oh man,
didn't LED madness take like 5 pieces of power in a row while long never won anything?

The truth is out there.

[Smmenen]

 does this mean I have to put BM Gifts on my battle of the banned decks guantlet? 

[Anusien]

I'm abusing the hell out of this quote, but it's really telling.

I don't think this errata will make ANYBODY happy - nobody seemed to be complaining about the deck, Legacy players will be unhappy that one of the pet decks to develop in the format has been errated into worthlessness, and anyone who owns a Time Vault has just lost a lot of value.

I also agree with the above statements about Dragon and Mask. Illusionary Mask+Dreadnaught does not work at all as intended. Reanimation Enchantments + Worldgorger Dragon also does not work as intended. The precident for this Time Vault change will have the after effect of destabalizing enough of the Vintage/Legacy singles market that is worrysome. I don't envision being able to sell any Illusionary Masks, period, given that Wizards could easily change the card at a moment's notice, with no advance warning, to be worthless due to a non-interaction with Phyrexian Dreadnaught.

[Necrologia]

does this mean I have to put BM Gifts on my battle of the banned decks guantlet?

Oh man, I'd pay money to see BM Gifts v 4x LED Long and company. Seriously, that's like the best reason to get premium ever.

Heh, and I thought the BM Gifts v Ichorid article was good. 

[Tha Gunslinga]

This is certainly true.  I wonder if the market will take some kind of long term hit because of this.  Fuck, I can't even imagine how much of a price drop Time Vault just took because of this.

Pre-Fusillade it was approximately $30 UL and $50 A/B.  Back then it still comboed with Lodestone Myr, which, while it didn't see play, was at least a possibility.  With that gone, it's still playable in Stax with Smokestack and such, but it can't really *do* much of anything.  I would expect Vault to plunge down extremely quickly once people figure out what happened, and probably to level off at the 30/50 it was at before, if not a bit lower.  Obviously this is a good time to sell.

[MoxMonkey]

Man I was going to buy a Time Vault and quit Slaver finally, then Wizards has to ruin my deck.  Thank you Wizards now I'll never stop playing Slaver.

[Largent]

Here is what I wrote to Mark Gottlieb:

"Integrity of the card"?  How about the integrity of the game?
Changing the errata on Time Vault 8 months after a particular usage
has become well established in Legacy and Vintage is shameful.  If you
wanted to restore the original intent, that should have been done at
the time of the restricted/banning announcements.  You blatently
permitted the market and the player base to assume that the combo was
considered fair and fine and have upended that expectation in a manner
worse than if you had just decided to restrict the card, since at
least restrictions occur at a particular point in time.

The existence of the combo is as "irrellevant" as the company's
no-reprint policy.  The combo and the no-reprint policy relate to the
integrity of the game as a collectible commodity.  Good job and
putting a huge dent in that reputation.  And this time, you'll not
only have pissed off the dealers, but a huge swath of players who
could  care less if you reprint power or not, but are going to be quite
irritated at this manuver, beginning with me.

ever think about running for president?

[pyr0ma5ta]

Here is what I wrote to Mark Gottlieb:

"Integrity of the card"?  How about the integrity of the game?
Changing the errata on Time Vault 8 months after a particular usage
has become well established in Legacy and Vintage is shameful.  If you
wanted to restore the original intent, that should have been done at
the time of the restricted/banning announcements.  You blatently
permitted the market and the player base to assume that the combo was
considered fair and fine and have upended that expectation in a manner
worse than if you had just decided to restrict the card, since at
least restrictions occur at a particular point in time.

The existence of the combo is as "irrellevant" as the company's
no-reprint policy.  The combo and the no-reprint policy relate to the
integrity of the game as a collectible commodity.  Good job and
putting a huge dent in that reputation.  And this time, you'll not
only have pissed off the dealers, but a huge swath of players who
could  care less if you reprint power or not, but are going to be quite
irritated at this manuver, beginning with me.

Quoted for savage truthery.