haywire wrote: ↑4 months ago
Timepiece of Failed Futures 1
Artifact {U}
Timepiece of Failed Futures enters the battlefield tapped.
t: You lose the game, then you win the game.
"Oh, that future? Nah, it's no good. The city gets leveled, which sort of goes against your goal of trying to save it. But it does beat the invasion after that, so maybe there's some potential."
—Didri, vedalken chronomancer
This card was posted one hour after the design deadline. This is the difference between Boros and Azorius when enforcing the law: the Azorius apply it literally, the Boros know when to close one or both eyes. I am Boros on this, but I'm not the host this month, so if the Azorius say you're DQ'ed for being just one hour late, that's what I, as a Boros, have to regretfully apply. I will still judge your card as normal, except in Main Challenge of course (that needs to be a zero for this to be a DQ).
Design
(1/3) Appeal - No one is interested in a card that makes them lose the game. Maybe Johnny could try to figure out someway for the losing part to not happen, like pairing this with
Platinum Angel: if you have the Angel on the battlefield, the "you lose" part can't happen, so nothing happens for that part and the ability actually gets to resolve its second part, which results in you winning the game.
EDIT - It turns out this was the actual intent behind this card design. It also turns out that you can do it with Cloudsteel Kirin in Standard. This doesn't really change anything here, it's still a card that requires other cards with a very specific effect to function, and there aren't that many in existence with that effect. Yes, one could be in Standard, but could you really play a Standard deck with 4x Cloudsteel Kirin and 4x this card? Then what else do you play, a control shell to try to stall the game until you can assemble this combo? Yes, it's Johnny's paradise, but it's still too narrow to use practically. Maybe in older formats where you can have more redundancy with the "can't lose" effects, but you still need those. You can't build a deck with this card and not include "can't lose" effects. It forces your choices in deckbuilding rather than giving you options to build different decks. I'm sorry, but my opinion on this card doesn't change, it's too A + B and too narrow.
Or he could
Donate this to an opponent and then somehow force them to activate the tap ability to make
them lose. But Timmy and Spike just don't care at best and hate this card at worst.
(1/3) Elegance - The text is apparently easy to understand, but its consequences might be not. You can't win if you've already lost. If you've lost, you've lost. There is no coming back to win. Some players might think they actually get to lose and then win, because they might remember other effects interacting in a different way (see Viability).
Development
(0/3) Viability - This is not viable to print as is, at all. It's not that there are problems with this being colorless, and not even with the fact that this should at the very least be a mythic if printed for real (which again, I, as a real Wizards editor, would forbid), but with the rules. The problem underlying all this judgment is that if you ever activate the tap ability, you lose the game, period. When you lose, you lose. You're no longer in the game, so you're not there anymore to win afterwards. The "then you win the game" part will never happen, as you're already out of the game and thus can't be affected by resolving spells or abilities anymore. Here are the rules from the CR (LCI edition, still the most recent one at the time of this writing) supporting this interpretation:
CR (LCI) wrote:
104.3e An effect may state that a player loses the game.
That's preceded by three rules saying you can lose the game as a state-based action if you have 0 or less life, if you're required to draw a card from an empty library, or if you have ten or more poison counters. Those are SBAs, so they are only checked at specific times, aka whenever a player is about to receive priority, and that's why, for example, you can survive if you go below 0 life but end up again above zero before you get priority, like for example during the resolution of a single spell or ability.
(See for example the famous case of
Judge Dave having to explain why a parody song by MTGRemy is wrong. That song was a parody of one of my favorite songs of all time,
"The way" by Fastball, that becomes
"The play", involving Sword of Hearth and Home and Abyssal Persecutor, a combo that according to MTGRemy wins you the game on the spot, but it actually doesn't work in the rules exactly because SBAs are only checked at predetermined times and not continuously, as Judge Dave explains. I'm a big fan of both Judge Dave and MTGRemy, so I'm happy I get to quote both of them in one of my judgments! Thank you for giving me this opportunity!)
But losing the game due to an effect, like on this card, is NOT an SBA, so it happens immediately, like conceding the game (104.3a). But even if that were not the case, what happens when a player would win and lose at the same time?
104.3f If a player would both win and lose the game simultaneously, that player loses the game.
You would lose anyway. One could argue that here there is a sequence: first you lose and then you win, but that's even worse because there are no simultaneous effects there, you just lose before you win. But even if they happened at the same time, you'd lose anyway. This is a card that might cause some players to think that they can come back after they lose to win, but what it actually does is just making you lose. Written like this, and under the current rules, this card is just unprintable. I don't see how it could make it past the rules team.
(0/3) Balance - No matter the format, limited or constructed, casual or multiplayer, this is a card that functionally reads "
T: You lose the game." That's it. Who would ever want to play that? This is worse than
One with Nothing, with that at least you're still technically in the game though with no cards in hand anymore.
Creativity
(3/3) Uniqueness - The tap ability is definitely unique, too bad it doesn't work as intended. But if we're talking Uniqueness, you get full points for that. If it worked, this card would be as memorable as
Mindslaver, a card that everybody still knows today, but was originally printed almost twenty years ago.
(3/3) Flavor - The flavor here is not only very good in all its elements (so full points here), but also ironic, as this card is actually a failed present, given that the tap ability works the opposite of what was clearly intended.
Polish
(3/3) Quality - All good as far as grammar and templating are concerned. See Viability for the real problems.
(0/2) Main Challenge - Besides this card having been posted only one hour too late, this would have very probably been a low score anyway. The Main Challenge asked you for a card that won you the game, but this one actually makes you lose it before you can win it. This would have been the opposite of what the Main Challenge was asking anyway.
(2/2) Subchallenges - Uncommon and lower mana value than your direct opponent.
Total: 13/25 DQ
