Too-Specific Top 10 - Timey-Wimey
October 13, 2023 by
DougY 
(The Tenth Doctor | Art by Luisa J Preissler)
The Land Before Time
Welcome to Too-Specific Top 10, where if there isn’t a category to rank our pet card at the top of, we’ll just make one up! (Did you know that Keldon Marauders is the only two mana creature with a "leaves the battlefield" trigger to deal damage?)
With Doctor Who spoilers all over the horizon, there is a palpable suspense surrounding Suspend cards. When it comes to finding those, however, it's not a difficult Scryfall search. Combine that with the amount of Suspend cards we're getting in the Doctor Who Commander (WHO) decks, and I don't think there's really that much to explore there, currently (just kidding, more on this once spoilers are done).
On the other hand, there are all sorts of other cards that use time counters, aren't there?
Top 10 Permanents With Time Counters
There are dozens of different counter types in Magic, of varying popularity. For most, those counters being named is nothing more than flavor and differentiation. Brick counters may tell us that a card is from Amonkhet and building toward something, but mechanically in the game they very rarely do anything besides get put on cards.
Not so with time counters. Somewhat similar to age counters from the Cumulative Upkeep mechanic but in reverse, time counters tend to be removed from a permanent one by one, usually during the upkeep. Even before this new influx of Doctor Who cards, however, there were already several cards that cared about and interacted directly with Time counters.
As with the Doctor Who examples, these all seem to care more about Suspend than anything else, but they do still allow for permanents on the battlefield. So, what are those permanents?
Criteria: Permanents that can place Time counters on themselves while on or entering the battlefield. As is tradition, all results are ordered by EDHREC score.
10. Aven Riftwatcher
(533 Inclusions, 0% of 1,412,108 Decks)
Right off the bat, I'm unimpressed. Don't get me wrong, leaves the battlefield triggers are rare, and if you do manage to blink this, then four life a go is pretty good. For anything outside of blink decks however, this is just not nearly enough.
9. Deadly Grub
(769 Inclusions, 0% of 1,601,965 Decks)
There will be more reasons to play Deadly Grub as more Time Travel and Jhoira's Timebug effects are printed, but the top of the heap for this thing is an Aristocrats brew that wants the death trigger and can keep the board empty enough that you can swing in for six with the Insect unimpeded. That's not zero decks, but it's a pretty specific use case.
8. Ravaging Riftwurm
(1,030 Inclusions, 0% of 1,431,763 Decks)
With six toughness to match the six power, things get a little better with Ravaging Riftwurm. For those doing the Blastoderm math, Riftwurm only sticks around to swing once without kicker before its time runs out, but if it blocks or gets blocked once it's acted as removal, not to mention being a 6/6 no one wants to swing into for a turn. Combine all that with a useful death trigger, and I can see a lot more use case for this one.
7. Lost Auramancers
(1,825 Inclusions, 0% of 1,406,870 Decks)
If we're looking for the number one Vanishing card to get better with more and more cards that remove time counters, it's probably Lost Auramancers. It was previously a bad tutor that takes three turns and has you asking why you would ever play it over Academy Rector (besides money, of course). Now, with things like The Tenth Doctor available, suddenly Lost Auramancers becomes an Academy Rector that is repeatable with recursion!
6. Deadwood Treefolk
(2,150 Inclusions, 0% of 1,431,763 Decks)
I especially like Deadwood Treefolk with a lot of these new effects, as many of them leave room to add or remove counters. With that in mind, if you'd rather have the Treefolk's leave the battlefield trigger, it's easy enough to speed things up.
With that said, at six mana, the only way this effect is worth it is if you're using it as a blink target that's going to get you two cards in hand every time. For your average deck that cares about time counters, this just doesn't do enough for the price.
5. Chronozoa
(2,254 Inclusions, 0% of 1,527,999 Decks)
I'm not sure offhand if this is in any of the new Suspend decks, but it absolutely should be. With Time Travel especially, this card can absolutely take over a game as things go exponential. Just some quick math on that, assuming that you could manage a board state where you were Time Travelling twice a turn:
And before you know it, you've got a Nintendo 64's worth of Chronozoas! Is this magical Christmasland? Yes, absolutely. But all I'm really trying to say is that if you've got a deck or commander that can pull counters off of this thing on the regular, the four mana is absolutely worth it. The best part? This strange, massive, single-cellular Illusion of an organism flies for some reason!
4. Reality Acid
(8,795 Inclusions, 1% of 1,527,999 Decks)
A mainstay of Blink decks since the invention of Commander, Reality Acid's leave the battlefield effect is some straight nonsense.
Unfortunately, that nonsense really only applies to Blink decks who can bring it back when it leaves the battlefield, making it not such a great choice when it comes to decks that instead care about time counters or Suspend.
3. Out of Time
(12,065 Inclusions, 1% of 1,406,870 Decks)
My favorite board wipe printed in the last five years, Out of Time usually just holds an entire table hostage until someone comes up with a Disenchant. Maybe that could change if you have the ability to remove Time counters every turn, but then what? Congratulations, you've managed to return to a board state that was bad enough for you that you felt the need to get rid of it. Sure, there's some outside cases where you'll need a whole bunch of tokens or what have you to finish out a game now that you have more of your pieces, but overall, I just don't think that Out of Time is the synergy piece you're looking for.
2. Deep Forest Hermit
(16,699 Inclusions, 1% of 1,431,763 Decks)
While removing time counters wouldn't do much for us here, adding them is fairly potent. 2/2 Squirrels are twice as big as 1/1 Squirrels, after all.
Throw in some recursion and/or blink, and you've got a great piece for just about any deck that is playing in this space.
1. As Foretold
(18,547 Inclusions, 1% of 1,527,999 Decks)
Speaking of cards that are amazing when you can add time counters to things, it doesn't get any better than As Foretold. Even at its base rate of getting one mana value better a turn, it only takes a couple of turns for As Foretold to feel patently ridiculous. Add more as you go, and it's only gonna take a couple turns before this little enchantment just says "cast a card for free during each player's turn".
Honorable Mentions
We're scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but there are a few more old cards that might find their way into your new Time Travel decks:
Okay, okay, there's no reasonable reason that you should be playing Time Bomb. But setting aside logic and card evaluation, it's Time Bomb! Why wouldn't you be playing it? As for Infinite Hourglass, under normal circumstances there's every reason that you'd be wary of players removing your time counters by paying three. When you're stacking them multiple times a turn, however, that gets expensive quickly. You'd better be stacking up those Chronozoas, though, because this bad old artifact does indeed say "all creatures", not "all creatures you control". Finally, more Aristocrats, Blink, and Aggro decks should be playing Keldon Marauders in general.
What's much more exciting right now, however, is all these brand new spoilers out of Doctor Who. If you were wondering where all this Suspend and Time Travel hype was coming from, here's a smattering of the things you'll see in the 99:
The Parting of the Ways doesn't even need to be in a time counters deck to be a haymaker, Time Beetle is going to have you casting all sorts of nonsense during your combat step, and All of History, All at Once is about to introduce a whole bunch of people to just how good Suspend is with Storm.
And finally, some of the new permanents with time counters on them:
While it probably didn't raise that many eyebrows for the casual fan, one of the cards that's going to make the biggest splash in cEDH from WHO is Flesh Duplicate, simply because it's a second copy of Phantasmal Image. Admittedly, it's not as good, given that it's two blue pips, but two mana is two mana, and creatures aren't getting any worse! On the casual side of things, however, my new favorite is Wilfred Mott. White card draw is still hard to come by, and his upside is a lot better than the card that's been getting a lot more hype, Four Knocks. Finally, Regenerations Restored's Vanishing 12 is a huge number to overcome, but is cheap enough that those free scrys and lifegain are going to add up, even if you never get to do your Time Walk.
Nuts and Bolts
There always seems to be a bit of interest in how these lists are made (this seems like a good time to stress once again that they are based on EDHREC score, NOT my personal opinion…), and people are often surprised that I’m not using any special data or .json from EDHREC, but rather just muddling my way through with some Scryfall knowledge! For your enjoyment/research, here is this week’s Scryfall search.
What Do You Think?
Overall, it's plain from our top ten today that Vanishing and time counters on permanents are going to be nothing but a side dish to the revolution in Suspend we're about to see. Still, I personally am excited for Time Travel in all its forms, how about you?
And finally, what is your favorite permanent that utilizes Time counters? Do you have a new favorite Suspend/Time Travel enabler? Are you building any decks that are going to utilize any of these old cards in better fashion than I'm seeing?
Let us know in the comments, and we'll see you at the rapidly disintegrating IKEA table that's honestly just a ticking Time Bomb.
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DougY
Doug has been an avid Magic player since Fallen Empires, when his older brother traded him some epic blue Homarids for all of his Islands. As for Commander, he's been playing since 2010, when he started off by making a two-player oriented G/R Land Destruction deck. Nailed it. In his spare time when he's not playing Magic, writing about Magic or doing his day job, he runs a YouTube channel or two, keeps up a College Football Computer Poll, and is attempting to gif every scene of the Star Wars prequels.
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