Hey everyone. This is Scott from the top four of the Great Designer Search 3.
In this series of articles I give some thoughts on Magic card design from an outsider’s perspective.
Inspired by the recent talk of Alrund’s Epiphany potentially being ban worthy in standard, I thought it might be fun today to see if we can come up with some extra turn spells that aren’t miserable.
It’s a story as old a Magic itself: players finding ways to combo into infinite turns with cards like Time Vault or Nexus of Fate, or getting so much value off an extra turn or two that the game ends like with cards like Alrund’s Epiphany.
Neither of these are super satisfying play patterns, that is, the series of ways for the games to play out that are fun for all players, as Play Design member Melissa DeTora talks about here from 26:30 to 28:00:
So that brings us to the question: is it possible to make extra turn cards with fun play patterns?
There’s only one way to find out. Let’s find out by taking a crack at them in three different ways, starting with…
1. Some Sort of Restriction
This category of extra turn cards are like the three above, they either affect the extra turn in some way negatively, or they allow the opponent to interfere with it.
This type of extra turn card can potentially result in more fun play patterns, since they need to be built around, resulting in more fragile combos rather than pure value.
However, they’re not perfect. A card like Final Fortune essentially does nothing unless it’s winning you the game, which can feel bad, and having a player counter your Temporal Extortion by paying life is about as much fun as having a bucket of water tossed on your fireworks before they go off.
Of course there are tons of other restrictions that extra turns spells could have, such as taking an extra turn but you can’t cast spells during it, or taking an extra turn but exiling all cards from your library. However, I feel like those are playing into the same space as something like Final Fortune, which either does nothing or wins the game.
So let’s see what else we can come up with:
Something like Phyrexian Plunge is pretty straightforward. Yes, it’s a strictly worse Time Warp, but it also prevents abuse. Unless you have some way of not losing the game, like a Platinum Angel in play, you can only take one extra turn with it.
Sure, you can get your value, but your opponent also doesn’t have to worry about sitting there staring at the clock since you can’t copy the spell, recast it, etc.
This one gets the job done, potentially in a flavorful way, but it’s not super exciting.
At first glance, A Timely Deal might look like just a worse Savor the Moment. And in one-versus-one, it probably is, since your opponent can just choose whichever step would be worst for you to skip.
But in multiplayer, things get more fun. You get to choose which opponent picks your skipped phase, so if you ask a friend then you might get exactly what you need.
Something like this lets other players at the table feel like they have some amount of agency in the extra turns being taken.
How many times have you lost the game because you had to tap out against the turns-combo opponent? Or because your counterspell was your top card and not in your hand?
Something like Time Ripple looks to play into that space. It helps opponents feel less bad if they tapped out at a key moment, or at the very least it gives them a bit of the value that you get as well.
Overall I’d grade these kinds of extra turn spells low potential for fun play patterns. In my opinion they’re better than just straight up “get an extra turn,” or even worse “get an extra turn plus upside,” but they still feel a little bad on one side or the other.
#2. An Opportunity for Interaction
This category of extra turn cards are like the three above — they’re slower ways of taking extra turns. These kinds are typically permanents, allowing the opponents not only time to interact with them, but also more axes of interaction too since other colors can more easily destroy creatures, artifacts and enchantments.
This type of extra turn card typically results in more fun play patterns, since opponents can get rid of them before they fully go off.
However, they’re not perfect. They quite often require a hefty investment, and they can feel miserable for the player when they don’t get to go off.
Let’s see what we can come up with for this category:
First up is the obvious design of putting an extra turn on a naturally slow card: a class enchantment like we got in Adventures in Forgotten Realms, or a saga enchantment like from Dominaria/Theros/Kaldheim.
Personally, I’m not sure about this one. It’s really hard to find the balance between unplayable and too good here. Sure, there are a lot of knobs to turn, but all it takes is one slightly off knob to ruin the whole thing. If you give decent value at each step, then there’s no reason not to play it; but if you don’t give enough value, then no one will play it.
This kind of implementation does give non-red-playing opponents a chance to get rid of it before it goes off, but that’s about all it does. I think we can do better,
This one is like Nevinyrral’s Disk and Time Warp stapled together. Your opponents have a turn to deal with it, but if they don’t, you get to go off. Also it prevents abuse with things like Voltaic Key, since you can’t target it with anything.
Oh, and if your opponents deal with it via targeted removal, they become the ones who get to go off!
While that can definitely result in some feel bad moments, the owner of the card can target it again and get it back, turning it into a game of hot time-potato.
Something like this combines the interactivity of Wanderwine Prophets (vulnerable to kill spells) with the slower nature of Search the City, but is able to do it at a cheap cost since it requires a creature, time, and no interaction from the opponent to work.
If Curious Obsession can be one mana and generate value every hit, then I think this one can slot into the same cost too.
When you go off with this, it’s sweet for sure, but you’ve also definitely earned it.
Overall I’d grade these kinds of extra turn spells medium potential for fun play patterns. They’re better than normal “extra turn” spells, but they can still feel bad for the caster when they don’t work out. Maybe there’s a way to alleviate that?
#3. Multicolor Extra Turn Spells
This category of extra turn cards are like the three above and pretty straightforward: they’re multicolored.
This type of extra turn card typically results in more fun play patterns, since the extra color adds for more flexibility in what the card can do.
Honestly, I think this category has the strongest potential for fun extra turn cards. Not only are multicolored cards naturally more restrictive to cast, but they can dip into other abilities that don’t make sense in mono-blue.
Here’s some examples for this category:
One of the worst things about extra turn cards in general is that the difference between when they’re good and bad is huge. When they’re good, they win the game. When they’re bad, they’re a very expensive cantrip.
But something like Glorious Timerays shows a strength of multicolor extra turn cards: they can do something separate from the extra turn itself. Here, you always get the extra combat step no matter what. Then, if another condition is fulfilled, you get the extra turn.
This does two things:
(1) It can reduce the feel-bads for the person casting the spell, since it will do something even if they don’t fulfill the condition, and reduce the feel-bads for the person on the receiving end, since at least they’re not losing the game out of nowhere — the opponent had to build up to it.
That’s a very different feeling than your opponent summoning an army out of nowhere with Alrund’s Epiphany and winning the game.
And (2) it allows to help cost the extra turn spells higher naturally, without them looking “strictly worse” than previous ones.
It’s a similar story here, though with a “fallback” ability that is more generically useful, and an extra sacrifice cost. Sacrificing a planeswalker is not only flavorful, but also hard to do, since they’re usually expensive so it’s hard to case one and this spell in the same turn, and they can also be taken off the board in a variety of ways by the opponent.
Not only that, but taking a planeswalker off your own board significantly lowers the power of your upcoming extra turn too.
This kind of extra turn spell that requires an extra cost, especially a cost that opponents can interact with, seems like it could be a good direction for extra turn spells to head in.
Another spell that always does something, but grants the extra turn when a condition has been fulfilled. Here, I like how casting one of them may help build up to the bonus for the next one, if you have a way to pump the token.
Something like this makes the extra turn feel like a goal to work toward, something satisfying when achieved, not just an “Oh I guess I win now” situation.
Finally, combining all three categories into one. The restriction of having your turns limited because of damage being dealt to you, the interactivity of giving opponents time to deal with it, and having it multicolored.
Something like this could be a little dangerous if combined with artifact sacrifice synergies, damage prevention, or dipping into another color for extreme lifegain, but I think that in and of itself could be a good thing. Extra turn cards are at their best when they’re part of janky combos, when you have to run suboptimal cards to make them work, not when they’re powerful just by themselves.
Overall I’d grade these kinds of extra turn spells high potential for fun play patterns. They have to be built around, at worst they do something besides cantrip, and they feel earned when getting full value. I don’t think they’re perfect, but I’d definitely like to playtest some of them.
So what do you think? Do you have any ideas for how to make extra turn spells fun? Or is that basically an impossible anomaly?
Either way, let me know, and looking forward to going on more deadly design dives with you soon.