Hey there, I’m Scott. You might remember me from last year’s Great Designer Search 3. I was the guy who for some reason decided to do Samurai for the tribal challenge, and who tried to give creatures Flashback.
But hey, at least my Blobification was cool!
I definitely made a lot mistakes back then, but honestly, that’s what good design is all about: making mistakes, learning from them, and then doing better in the future.
And that’s exactly what I want to talk about in this series of articles. I want to look at cards that Wizards makes and discuss them on the design level.
I think it’s important for us to always remember that official Magic cards are designed by people who can make mistakes too, and each card that we see in print is only one of an infinite number of possibilities that it could’ve been. So why don’t we take a peek behind some of them and see what some of their other versions could’ve been!
Let’s start off with what I personally consider to be one of three planeswalker mistakes in War of the Spark:
#1. Teferi, Time Raveler
Oh god, just looking at this card is already giving me uncontrollable shakes, and it’s only been legal for a few weeks.
First things first, we have to give credit where credit is due. Out of the incredible 37 planeswalkers in War of the Spark, the vast majority of them are great. Most are narrow enough to only fit into certain decks, while still providing a lot of cool deckbuilding possibilities for those strategies.
However, since this was Wizards’s first foray into putting static/triggered abilities on planeswalkers, two things happened: (1) they tried out a ton of different possibilities, and (2) some of them really suck.
And some of them are reminders of the most miserable cards in Magic.
Blood Moon, Choke, and Trinisphere (among other similar older cards) all have two things in common: they can lock out opponents from playing Magic, and they only cost three mana.
Teferi, Time Raveler does something similar. If you’re playing a deck that wants to interact at instant speed—with counterspells, protection spells, pump spells, anything—it’s potentially game over on turn three.
For example, if you’re playing a control deck, and you have to tap out on turn two to play a draw spell to try and make your third land drop, and that lets your opponent sneak in a Teferi, Time Raveler while you’re left with a hand of now-useless counterspells, the game is essentially over. Or if you’re playing a midrange deck and your turn-three three-mana creature gets bounced by Teferi, then your followup creature gets killed while Teferi is ticking back up, the game is essentially over.
More recently-designed cards that can lock out opponents from playing Magic usually cost at least five/six mana, since that’s the point in the game where both players should have slightly more established boards/hands. If you don’t have interaction by turn five/six, or haven’t won the game yet, then sure, you might get locked out.
Three reasonably-costed cards that stop certain strategies… including Teferi himself!
But I don’t want to just rag on Teferi. I want to see if there’s a way that he could’ve been differently designed, to do what the card intended to do, but in a more fun way.
Here’s some possibilities for other versions of Teferi:
I really like Teferi, Time Raveler’s original +1 ability. It’s flavorful in how he messes with time by allowing sorceries at instant speed, and it adds a neat, new dynamic to the game. But it’s unfortunate that the ability is rarely taken advantage of, usually just seen as a way to get his loyalty back up, or to occasionally cast an instant speed wrath.
Instead, I think Teferi would be much more interesting if the +1 ability was his static ability. Having Teferi be a build-around planeswalker based on turning sorceries into instants, and rewarding you for casting big sorceries (such as the cycle of mythic Finales!) would be really cool and something we haven’t really seen before.
Here’s another take on Teferi, one that tries to preserve his anti-interaction ability without completely invalidating strategies:
Rather than outright punishing an opponent by not letting them play their cards at all, this version takes a softer approach. Your opponent is still incentivized not to cast their spells at instant speed, but they can in an emergency,
The plus ability now has some relevance to the static ability, since you can wait until after combat or after casting your own spells to see if your opponent has any responses to scry deeper. Or you can play your own card draw on your own turn too and get rewarded.
Lastly, the bounce effect is still there, so that the card still has some use in control decks against aggro. But now that the static ability provides card advantage, the draw a card can go away, turning Teferi’s minus into the same as Jace, the Living Guildpact. That wasn’t an especially strong card back in M15, but Jace also cost four mana and didn’t have a static abillity, so it could be more impacftul here.
Bad abilities on one planeswalker could be better on another when re-contextualized.
Lastly, here’s just a few more takes on Teferi, showing the range of possibilities that the card could have:
Aggro Helper is based around how the current Teferi, in a blue-white aggro deck, prevents your control opponent from just playing draw-go. This guy can come down, save a creature or two, or bounce a key wrath or planeswalker for you to swing in for the win.
Only having minus abilities gives some good tension for when to use the abilities, and it also could incentivize fun build-arounds with white/blue proliferate cards like Grateful Apparition or Contentious Plan.
Temporal Warper cranks up the static abilities of planeswalkers to the max, allowing for something really unique: a planeswalker that you can cast during your opponent’s turn. He can be cashed in immediately to play your opponent’s spell, or stick around to tick up and down.
Fun Enabler is just something way out there to see how we can do something more exciting with a time planeswalker. Doubling upkeeps, skipping end steps, and blinking/copying artifacts and enchantments could make for a fun deck somewhere.
Doubling up on Patient Rebuilding or Dreadhorde Invasion triggers (and the enchantments themselves!) could be fun, same with skipping the pesky “you lose the game” part of Chance for Glory.
Well, I can’t believe that’s over 1,000 words about Teferi, Time Raveler! We’ll be back next time to examine another planeswalker from the set, and take a look at some different ways that she could have gone instead.