Are time warps secretly traps?

[Dunharrow]

discussion aside I wish they made more 'target player skips a turn' and fewer 'take an extra turn'. In 1v1 it is the same, but in multiplayer an extra turn is so much more powerful it's nuts.

A 5 mana sorcery "target player skips their next turn" would be unbelievably bad though. Idk how much that effect would have to cost, but probably like...1 mana maybe (which would obviously be incredibly busted in other formats)? And it would be extremely miserable to be the person who got turn-skipped. I don't really think there's any satisfying way to "fix" extra turns besides just...stop printing the stupid things, please.

But that's my point. If they want them in standard, I don't care. Just stop making more time warps for EDH. It's enough! Target player skips a turn is a good solution. Make them cost 5 and more!

[pokken]

They have a target player skips their next turn basically called exhaustion. I used to play it in taking turns and it was usually quite good.

[umtiger]

1.) If anything, your extra turn is only 33% as effective because you have more opponents to fight.

Lol what a hot take. All cards are 1/3 as good in commander

(I hope it's obvious why this logic makes zero sense)

btw wtf does Seedtime do vs extra turns? Unless it's nexus and they're casting it on your turn.

Incidentally nexus is being criminally underrated in this thread.
1) It literally just wins you the game without any support if you draw/mill your deck
2) instant-speed is a big deal since you can have 2 complete back-to-back turns with full mana, enabling stuff like board wipe turn into board presence turn, or fully-productive turn into keep-up-countermagic-mana turn.

I apologize for typing Seedtime. I had it incorrectly memorized.

"All cards are 1/3 as good in commander" are your words not mine. After all, we're just talking about a specific card here. But of course, you have to type that to follow up your "hot take" crap.

If someone is going to get to say Time Warp is 3x effective because "edh," someone else should get to retort that it's 1/3 effective.

Setting up a Time Warp to close the game is for sure tougher when there's more opponents. You're facing a much larger hill to climb with 40 life and 3 opponents. Plus you're having to commit more to the field in order to make it happen in the first place.

As for "end the turn," Time Stop is effectively "End the turn" at 6cmc instant speed. It's more effective used as countermagic/stifle/fog, but most of the time I've seen it played, someone just says f-you to one player at upkeep.

[pokken]

Time warps like rhystic study effects scale with the number of players but because you don't really have to defeat three players (they work against each other too, so it's not archenemy) this becomes disproportionate advantage.

Imagine if commander had a rule that made all removal spells scale to one target per opponent like rhystic study and time warp do; now removal spells are the best thing to be doing and as a side effect of that countermagic is much worse (since it's purely reactive).

That simple thought experiment hopefully shows how linear scaling with opponents is disproportionate advantage in a 4 player free for all game.

(You can look through the most played cards in commander and see that many of the staples are things that scale based on your opponent count. Things like seedborn muse and prophet of kruphix, are probably the most obvious examples other than hullbreacher and rhystic study and smothering tithe.

The reason for that is that things that count All your opponents as foes for purpose of generating advantage when in fact two of them are often your allies, will be disproportionately good.)

[DirkGently]

"All cards are 1/3 as good in commander" are your words not mine. After all, we're just talking about a specific card here. But of course, you have to type that to follow up your "hot take" crap.

Eesh, touchy. Hard day at work?

You said "your extra turn is only 33% as effective because you have more opponents to fight." Does that logic not hold equally true (which is to say: not true) for literally everything you do in commander? Why would it only apply to extra turns? I'm just extrapolating logically from what you said. That's kinda how arguing works.

If someone is going to get to say Time Warp is 3x effective because "edh," someone else should get to retort that it's 1/3 effective.

And both those people are wrong?

Though I can kinda see where 3x as effective makes semi-sense - reword the card as "skip the next 3 opponents turns" (and assume it's always 4 player). I think it works in roughly the same space as cards that affect each opponent, in terms of how it scales.

The word "should" makes no sense to me when we're talking about truth claims. If you want to poke holes in someone else's argument that doesn't mean you "should" take up a contrary fallacious position.

Setting up a Time Warp to close the game is for sure tougher when there's more opponents. You're facing a much larger hill to climb with 40 life and 3 opponents. Plus you're having to commit more to the field in order to make it happen in the first place.

The entire game is tougher with 3 opponents, that doesn't change the effectiveness of cards though. Besides which I think we're all experienced enough to know that there are plenty of ways to win the game that don't require a ton of board setup. Winning the game is just one possible use for time magic.

As for "end the turn," Time Stop is effectively "End the turn" at 6cmc instant speed. It's more effective used as countermagic/stifle/fog, but most of the time I've seen it played, someone just says f-you to one player at upkeep.

Really? That's almost impressively bad play imo. But then I see people sac their treasures before tapping their lands all the time so I guess it doesn't surprise me. The terribleness of commander players knows no bounds.

EDIT: to elaborate, clarify, and correct myself:

Cards which effect you work at the same efficiency rate as 1:1 magic. Obviously we have to say that Divination is equally effective - you're not drawing 2/3 of a card, you're still gaining card advantage when you cast it. Similarly, gain life effects, time magic, bodies on the board, etc. Obviously bodies on the board will have more enemy bodies to compete against, but having more potential enemy bodies makes it all the more important to have blockers.

Same dealio for cards like Windgrace's Judgment which hit each opponent. We're +1 permanent relative to each opponent when we play a permanent, and we're +1 permanent relative to each opponent when we play WJ, so they're both the same efficiency.

When we get to 1:1 removal like Swords to Plowshares, one could technically say they're at 1/3 effectiveness, but this is only true in a very abstract sense of the game, not the reality of the game. In reality cards like WJ are often killing one important permanent, and two "eh, I guess" permanents, or even nothing at all if one player is far ahead. Whenever you use removal against a player, you're harming their win%. In 1v1, you add 100% of their wr% loss to your own. In commander, you usually don't. So removal is less effective overall, but it's somewhere between 1/3 and 1, depending on the specifics, I would say. If the table is perfectly balanced, it's 1/3. If the table is heavily imbalanced with most of the wr% between you and the other player, it might be pretty close to 1. And ofc there are times, like breaking a combo, where the wr% is equally distributed between you and the other two players, but you still needed to do it or you would have guaranteed lost. Technically that might be 1/3 effectiveness (or potentially even less!), but it still gave you a huge wr% bump because otherwise it was going to be 0%.

That's kind of where we end up in the weeds here - theory doesn't really adequately describe the situation on the ground. Similarly, while I would say blocking is at 100% effectiveness, attacking is at 1/3 effectiveness, so where does that put creatures at the end of the day? In the end I think it's largely pointless, as the theory becomes more and more abstract from the reality of what's going on in the actual game.

[hyalopterouslemur]

The infinite combo I was thinking of is Time Warp and Charmbreaker Devils. Just exile your graveyard before doing it. There are a few more like that.

You can also blink Eternal Witness or Archaeomancer/Mnemonic Wall.

Ezuri, Claw of Progress just needs Sage of Hours… (Use Deranged Hermit to get five experience counters.)

Hence why Time Stretch is a trap.

[toctheyounger]

I don't think they're traps, but I think they're contentious in their own way. Ultimately they end up causing an unfair division of resources, however you slice it.

Best case scenario with someone playing it as part of a fairly well-tuned deck they can use it to give themselves enough space to find a combo/enact a combo, and with 3 full turns having been missed, it's that three time harder to pull that apart (assuming 4 players who predominantly would use their resources during their own turn).

Worst case scenario you've got someone playing them who just thinks they're cool and jams them in to durdle. That's neat and all, but this time instead of dividing up gameplay resource like mana and priority, you've got someone stuck in decision paralysis or wallowing in their own crapulence wasting everyone else's spare time. And truthfully I've seen as many games end the latter way as the former.

As to whether they're traps or not, I think in general they're very good value. The absolute basement for value is 2 land drops to the rest of the tables 1, plus maybe an extra spell. The ceiling of value is making your window for a win significantly wider and significantly easier to aim for.

I actually wouldn't be mad to see the higher end of extra turns cards be banned from the format (Time Warp, Temporal Manipulation, Nexus of Fate come to mind).

[DirkGently]

The infinite combo I was thinking of is Time Warp and Charmbreaker Devils. Just exile your graveyard before doing it. There are a few more like that.

You can also blink Eternal Witness or Archaeomancer/Mnemonic Wall.

Ezuri, Claw of Progress just needs Sage of Hours… (Use Deranged Hermit to get five experience counters.)

Hence why Time Stretch is a trap.

I don't know why it would matter which combo you're talking about. By the reasoning that things are traps if there are better options, all those combos are "traps" too because you could just be doing oracle + pact or whatever other more powerful thing. And those are at least directly comparable - if you're playing deck with no tutors and limited draw, naturalling into a 2-card combo is a lot less likely than just getting to 10 mana to cast a superbomb like time stretch. To make a reliable combo deck you probably want to have a fair number of tutors and whatnot, which requires a big deck commitment, especially if you're then adding in the requirement of exiling your grave or having a repeatable blink target or getting 5 xp on ezuri (not to mention most experienced players will anticipate the ezuri combo).

I guess what defines a "trap" is kind of subjective, but I think it would have to be inferior across all levels of decks - whether you're slamming individual bombs and largely ignoring synergies, to combos, to carefully tuned decks where every card has a crucial role. Superbombs like time stretch and expropriate are kinda noobish wincons (is there a more modern term for noob? I feel like there has to be, but I'm too old to know it) but they're effective at that level of deckbuilding. When someone less experienced beats me, it's usually because they slammed some dumb wincon like time stretch that my deck can't interact with.