New wording for Time Vault announced

[M.Solymossy]

I know, I know....  But, should we settle for second best when it can still be corrected?   

I think as much as I believe we need to have some control over the greatest magic format, OUR format... we need to let the company make some decisions for us, too.  Brainstorm wasn't the end of vintage (although it may have been the end of the 15 minutes of fame  ), so yeah I think second best is the best in this case, personally.

[diopter]

I am seriously tempted to write yet ANOTHER Time Vault article (not even because Gottlieb got it wrong, but because of my misguided sense that I have to correct every incorrect assertion on the internet), since apparently people only believe things that are official.

I think, Steve, that the battle has been won. Time to put down the sword. Is it perfect? Well, it's as good as we could have hoped for when we wrote that Power Level errata so long ago.

I know, I know....  But, should we settle for second best when it can still be corrected?  

I don't think we should settle until the Time Vault errata is easy enough for the average player to understand after one read. That's not going to happen with the current errata - that "begin the turn" clause is bizarre. I don't understand why they couldn't have just templated Time Vault like Mana Vault.

[LotusHead]

Well I'm happy about the skip THIS turn clause on Time Vault.  That means it again combos with Smokestack Tangle Wire and various lock peices. 

Well it took a whole week of MWS testing to find out it doesn't just "shut me off the having a turn thing" combo with SmokeStack. Unless I'm doing it wrong.



Can I skip my turns over and over with TimeVault? (Ie, Chalice for 0 in play, Sphere of Resistance in play, Smokestack set at 1 or more).

If not, then I freed up one card in my MainDeck

[Harlequin]

If you would begin your turn while Time Vault is tapped, you may skip that turn instead. If you do, untap Time Vault.

I think that tapped pooches your plan.  You will only actually be able to skip 1 turn before the replacement will no longer be in effect.  If you were to skip a turn, then immediately tap it, at  the end of your opponent's turn you would be able to skip your extra turn and then you would be 'forced' into your real turn with vault untapped.

[Godder]

Changing the Untap Step to be like the Declare Attackers Step or Draw Step would probably work i.e. do stuff at the beginning of the Step, and then have people gain priority normally. However, if you do that, why have an Upkeep Step at all?

On the other hand, why completely overhaul the rules to better support a handful of old cards that are only legal in a few tournament formats that are barely supported anyway? Hundreds of cards have been designed, developed and printed using the 6E rules and "at the beginning of your upkeep" triggers, and this is now an integral part of the rules of the game, and of design. Maybe they should have been better implemented at the time, but it's now 9 years on. The pros of working within the current ruleset far outweigh the cons of slightly odd wording on a few older cards that barely see use anyway.

Here's a challenge:

Come up with a wording for these old cards that works, without changing the rules of the game.

[Yare]

Steve,

I think I have to agree with Rich and say that it's time to move on. While I think you very well may be right, I think your efforts could be put into something else much more worthwhile. There's been a lot of effort put into this and we've gotten pretty much what we wanted (Time Vault + Twiddle = Combo). Yeah, it may not be perfect, but I think there are probably other fish worth frying at this point. I think we should applaud Gottlieb for this move, even if we don't agree with it in its entirety, and be glad that our voices were finally heard.

[desolutionist]

There is a difference between Tezzeret and Tendrils or Tezzeret and Mindslaver.  Tezzeret is a not very conditional win.  You can just tap 5 mana and win on your next turn.  The more Tezzerets you play, the more likely you'll draw one and the faster you'll win.  Having multiples is actually a GOOD thing since you can just play another after one has been countered.

The more win conditions a deck runs at the expense of support cards, the less resilient it becomes to common oppositional strategies.  That may be a risk some players are willing to take, but I would be surprised to see the top names running 4 Tezzeret.dec.  It's a great card to see when things are running pristinely, but a player under a Tangle Wire lock, Sphered out, or getting hit by Wastelands every turn will be happy he/she included that extra Chain of Vapor or means to find Hurkyl's Recall.

No, the extra Tezzeret or two would replace bad Brainstorm replacements like Impulse or Night's Whisper.  No one is going to be playing more than a set amount of "support" bounce spells.  Drain decks typically have a favored game against Stax anyway, so I don't see why Tangle Wire or Sphere of Resistance is a problem or how extra bounce spells stops Wasteland.  You're arguing that playing less than 4 Tezzerets creates room for other cards, but so far people have been sort of at loss with what to fill the deck up.  I've only seen excessive disruption/protection or other win conditions like Painter/GStone, neither being very good.

Lethal damage kills the Planeswalker, which stops infinite Vault untaps. (Lightning Bolt, Lava Dart, Fireblast, etc.)  There is also plenty of artifact removal in the format: Ancient Grudge, Rack and Ruin, Oxidize, Seal of Cleansing, etc.  Pithing Needle (Tez OR Vault) and Null Rod also shut down the combo.

It seems you missed the point I was making.  I didn't say "there's no way to get rid of a Time Vault or a Planeswalker."  I said that an opponent gaining infinite turns is an effect for which there is no defense in Magic.  We have abilities to the effect of "you can not be the target of spells or abilities this turn" and "prevent all damage" but nothing saying "prohibit target opponent from taking two or more turns in succession."  The distinction may be clearer for you now. 

Sure, but so what?

B
Creature
"Players can't take extra turns"
1/1

Would you actually play that card?

[ArsenicDrone]

I don't think we should settle until the Time Vault errata is easy enough for the average player to understand after one read. That's not going to happen with the current errata - that "begin the turn" clause is bizarre. I don't understand why they couldn't have just templated Time Vault like Mana Vault.

I'd say the unfortunate (though not very important) thing, if you want cards to work like they did in 1993, is that Mana Vault can't be templated like Time Vault without making it messier. As mentioned above, what happened then was that you applied the effect as you were about to untap. At the start of your turn, you could choose to skip the whole turn to untap your Time Vault. You can see why it worked this way: the untap option is worded as a clarification about what you need to do if you want to avoid the "doesn't untap normally." Let's not forget that there was very little rigor in the rules in those days. Hell, for a while we played Wall of Water and Wall of Fire as if the +1/+0 was permanent, because the ones we had (Revised) didn't say whether it went away at the end of the turn. They got huge!

At a glance, it seems like you might get a free untap, but that presumes that somehow you untap everything else before you make the choice about Time Vault, and you'd be regarded as a pretty dubious player if you tried to argue that. What happens when you skip your turn at the exact same time as you're trying to untap? The common sense of the time said you didn't untap. Oddly enough, as far as I know, the opposite was true for Mana Vault, because why wouldn't you be able to tap the lands you're untapping to help untap the Mana Vault? The turn's not over, so they would have untapped.

With the current Oracle wording, Time Vault now works the way it was (sensibly) interpreted when printed - and the original interpretation, while considered ban-worthy, was not considered to be inconsistent with the rules. I think that's as close as you can get to "original intent" without undue speculation and trusting fuzzy memories.

[Smmenen]

I don't think we should settle until the Time Vault errata is easy enough for the average player to understand after one read. That's not going to happen with the current errata - that "begin the turn" clause is bizarre. I don't understand why they couldn't have just templated Time Vault like Mana Vault.

I'd say the unfortunate (though not very important) thing, if you want cards to work like they did in 1993, is that Mana Vault can't be templated like Time Vault without making it messier. As mentioned above, what happened then was that you applied the effect as you were about to untap. At the start of your turn, you could choose to skip the whole turn to untap your Time Vault. You can see why it worked this way: the untap option is worded as a clarification about what you need to do if you want to avoid the "doesn't untap normally." Let's not forget that there was very little rigor in the rules in those days. Hell, for a while we played Wall of Water and Wall of Fire as if the +1/+0 was permanent, because the ones we had (Revised) didn't say whether it went away at the end of the turn. They got huge!

At a glance, it seems like you might get a free untap, but that presumes that somehow you untap everything else before you make the choice about Time Vault, and you'd be regarded as a pretty dubious player if you tried to argue that. What happens when you skip your turn at the exact same time as you're trying to untap? The common sense of the time said you didn't untap. Oddly enough, as far as I know, the opposite was true for Mana Vault, because why wouldn't you be able to tap the lands you're untapping to help untap the Mana Vault? The turn's not over, so they would have untapped.

With the current Oracle wording, Time Vault now works the way it was (sensibly) interpreted when printed - and the original interpretation, while considered ban-worthy, was not considered to be inconsistent with the rules. I think that's as close as you can get to "original intent" without undue speculation and trusting fuzzy memories.

You assume what you conclude.    You haven't provided any evidence that that was how Time Vault worked in 1993.   

[ArsenicDrone]

You assume what you conclude.    You haven't provided any evidence that that was how Time Vault worked in 1993.   

I'm not sure what sounded like an assumption, and no, I don't have a bloody knife or an article dated 1993 for evidence. I only have my own recollection, and was just clarifying why it was logical at the time. I guess to be precise, I started in 1994, so I took a small liberty with the year. I doubt the accepted interpretation of Time Vault changed much in that time (if anything, it probably solidified), as the wording hadn't changed.

Anyway, while it's true that by today's standards there are multiple possible interpretations of Time Vault's original wording, back then, consensus interpretation was often quite important, as the cards didn't give complete answers. I'm sure some players convinced their opponents that they could untap Time Vault whenever they wanted, but that was just the kind of thing that could keep them from getting invited back to the play group. It'd get them the dreaded "rules lawyer" label, which really meant "rules twister," and isn't much of an insult anymore. I expect if you find more people who remember how it was played, they'll support the current wording.

[Smmenen]

How is that argument different in spirit from people saying that the point of Time Vault is that in order to ever untap it, you must skip a turn.   Since, after all, it is a "store" of turns?

I played back then, and Time Vault was always played as a skip your next turn.   That's how it was used in tournaments at the time, and that's how everyone understood it to be used.   You skipped your next turn to untap it, but you could also tap it to cancel out that skip. 

[SiegeX]

I played back then, and Time Vault was always played as a skip your next turn.   That's how it was used in tournaments at the time, and that's how everyone understood it to be used.   You skipped your next turn to untap it, but you could also tap it to cancel out that skip. 

I played back then as well (in Southern California), and without a doubt time vault was untapped in lieu of taking your current turn.  As ArsenicDrone mentioned, back when there was no DCI governing body and thus no Official interpretations, rules text was consensus driven and it doesn't surprise me at all that these interpretations were geographically diverse. 

Without a response from Richard Garfield, this seems to be a loosing battle; and personally I wouldn't be surprised if the consensus is to keep it this way.

[brianpk80]

No, the extra Tezzeret or two would replace bad Brainstorm replacements like Impulse or Night's Whisper.  No one is going to be playing more than a set amount of "support" bounce spells.  Drain decks typically have a favored game against Stax anyway, so I don't see why Tangle Wire or Sphere of Resistance is a problem or how extra bounce spells stops Wasteland.  You're arguing that playing less than 4 Tezzerets creates room for other cards, but so far people have been sort of at loss with what to fill the deck up.  I've only seen excessive disruption/protection or other win conditions like Painter/GStone, neither being very good.

I don't see how you figure Drain decks without Gush > Stax decks.  Slaver and Oath aside, Stax tends to have an advantage in the Drain match-up.  As for support cards, I regret to hear that people are unable to figure out how to optimize a Tezzeret deck without resorting to throwing a 4-set of  5CC win conditions (plus another slot for TV) into a single shell, but the inability of early designers to meet the task doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't be done. 

Sure, but so what?

You missed the point the first time, and now your only response is to assert the point was pointless.  There's nothing to prove by arguing simply for argument's sake. 

B
Creature
"Players can't take extra turns"
1/1

Would you actually play that card?

Sure, if the meta became saturated (over 50%) with Time Vault abuse.  It would be comparable to Jailer as a sideboard meta slot.

[Nehptis]

I played back then, and Time Vault was always played as a skip your next turn.   That's how it was used in tournaments at the time, and that's how everyone understood it to be used.   You skipped your next turn to untap it, but you could also tap it to cancel out that skip. 

I played back then as well (in Southern California), and without a doubt time vault was untapped in lieu of taking your current turn. 

I concur.  Back then, in my play area (Mid-Atlantic), Time vault was simple.  Keep in mind that back then there was a lot more multi-player games.  3 or 4 players sitting around a table playing some 1v1v1v1 MTG.  A Vault play would go like this:

Player 1: Does Whatever.
Player 2: Has a tapped Vault in play.  "I'm gonna skip my turn and INSTEAD untap Vault".  He doesn't untap, or draw, or play spells, or attack.
Player 3: Does Whatever.   

Player 1: Does Whatever.
Player 2: Takes his normal turn. And during that turn uses (taps) his Time Vault.
Player 2: Takes his EXTRA turn.
Player 3: Does Whatever.