Pattern Recognition #252 - Time Travel

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

25 August 2022

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Good day everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut's longest running article series. I am something of an Old Fogey and a definite Smart Ass, and I have been around the block quite a few times. My experience is quite broad and deep, and so I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. Be it deck design, card construction, mechanics or in-universe characters and the history of the game. Or whatever happens to catch my attention each week. Which happens far more often than I care to admit. Please, feel free to talk about my subject matter in the comments at the bottom of the page, add suggestions or just plain correct me.

And welcome back everyone! Today on Pattern Recognition, I will talk about a plot device that is very common in science fiction, but rarely used in Fantasy. So rarely in fact, that Wizards has really only used it twice in my was, and soon once in my yet.

And if you're confused about tenses, I highly recommend getting your hands on the Continuum RPG the best (and really only) RPG based around Time Travel as its core mechanic. I don't have my copy anymore (don't ask, it got Fragged), but the word choices have stuck with me for ages.

But with that out of the way, let's talk Time Travel in Magic.

The short of it is that Wizards has made it very consistently clear that actual, legitimate, forwards-and-backwards Time Travel is very, very difficult. It is not used as a solve-all solution to the problem of the day, and it either something that is developed towards a single goal or for a single use.

Now, temporal manipulation is nothing new to the game. From Time Walk to Time Warp, altering the flow of time to one advantage has always been a thing. This is the domain of as part of their driving concept of being the 'power behind magic', and manipulating one of the fundamental vectors of realty to suit their needs is well within their potential grasp. But it's always been temporary or small scale effects. Never something big or permanent.

Actual Time Travel, therefore, has never really been represented in the game. Or rather, it has, but it's always exceptional and not replicatable.

The first even comes to us from the Urza's Block. But, as a note, a lot of this is PRE-REVISIONIST HISTORY, meaning that it isn't fully cannon by Wizards' standards, and as such can change at any time. And probably will change in three months or so. As part of this story, Phyrexia has attacked one of Urza's centers for developing anti-Phyrexia weapons, tactics and resources, the Tolarian Academy. During one of these raids, Jhoira of the Ghitu was killed, and Karn, Silver Golem, distraught over the loss of one of his two friends, attempted to find some way to save her or bring her back.

You see, Urza, the smart cookie that he was, considered the possibility of using Time Travel to go back in time and kill Yawgmoth or at least do something to his hated foe before he became the Ineffable. Naturally, he had tried more passive observations to lay the groundwork for his plan, Scrying as best he could. But his efforts didn't really pan out due to the distances and distortions involved. Scrying isn't an exact science you know. He decided instead to create a working Time Machine/Portal and send something through to achieve his objectives. Brute force where subtlety failed. However, he quickly ran into a problem that nothing physical could survive passing through his portal. He spent a lot of time developing various alchemical concoctions and alloys to try and persevere in the face of adversity, but in the end, he was going back to basics when he had a Stroke of Genius (literally, read the flavor text), and discovered that mystical purity of Silver allowed it to retain its form and integrity when it passed through his test portal.

With this knowledge in hand, he designed a Golem that could act in his stead, naming it Karn. He also merged the requisite temporal design with the requirements of his Legacy project and as a means to give his new creation sentience, rather than trust in potentially hazardous programming, installed the heart of the Phyrexian Newt and deceased ally, Xantcha, Sleeper Agent into Karn. This will lead to problems down the line, but that's for another time.

Anyway, once he was assured that Karn knew what he was to do, Urza decided that it was time to invoke his plan. He set up the Time Portal, calibrated it properly, and sent Karn through!

Well, that was the plan. Something went wrong, and the Portal exploded. This... kinda wrecked the Tolarian Academy (not the first, or the last), but because of the nature of the detonation, the island was riddled with shards, bubbles and lines of achronotic distortions, which in turn was utilized as a resource by both Urza and the hidden Phyrexians on his island to their mutual advantage and disadvantage.

But all this leads back to that Pyrexian raid that killed Jhoira. Karn decided that although the Time Portal didn't work by going back thousands and thousands of years across half the planet, maybe it could hold up to moving a few weeks and staying on the same island?

Well....

It worked. Karn jumped back in time early enough to prevent the raid, but doing so took the breakages across the Academy and shattered them, Karn's Temporal Sundering, creating the Tolarian Rift, which would be an on and off problem until Time Spiral. Karn saved Joihra, but Urza took one look at this problem, threw his hands up in disgust, told Barrin to take care of it, and went off to do other things for a couple centuries.

So there you have it, the first instance of Time Travel in Magic. An internal plot device that was established as something larger, then became a failure, and used for a smaller, more personal goal that was achieved, but not without cost.

The next instance of Time Travel in Magic would come from Time Spiral, but there is some side connotations with what happened here that needs to be addressed.

First, the events of Time Spiral do not, by necessity, indicate that Time Travel will has yet happened. Rather, while the Time Spiral block deserves its own multi-part analysis, I can summarize here that the broken timeframe of Dominaria at the time was not so much actual time travel as it was ... to borrow a phrase from Doctor Who... timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly.

To give this perspective, the character of Jaya Ballard, Task Mage was an Ice Age era character who sparked as a Planeswalker, and was later described as having died by Jodah, Archmage Eternal before the Invasion. During the Time Spiral block though, Jaya was brought to the present either as a duplicate from this timeline, or from an alternate timeline. This new Jaya in no way undid the existence of the previous Jaya, and she would go on to re-spark in the newer, easier-to-Spark Post Mending Era, becoming the best Pryo-Grandma anyone could ever have, Jaya Ballard.

Because of this confusion, and the counter example of Mishra, Artificer Prodigy being a person with a card in the set, and implied to visit the modern Dominara during the Time Spiral, which helped encourage his artificer's motivation, I can't be sure that the above is currently 'real'.

During this event tough, Karn Liberated, took responsibility for the Tolarian Rift, and in the process of closing it, reached through it, back in time to its origin, where he observed himself causing it - and at the same time, looked forward and saw something that horrified him to the point that the moment the rift was closed, he ran away as fast as he could. It's been 'clarified' that what Karn saw was the victory of New Phyrexia and their Compleation of Dominaria, which should happen over the course of the next year or so.

So yeah, the next four sets? We know how this ends, and have known for quite some time now.

Anyway, moving on to finer pastures, Magic's next foray into real Time Travel came in 2014/2015 (and has it really been that long?) with Khans of Tarkir, Fate Reforged and Dragons of Tarkir.

About 1300 years before the current time frame of Magic, Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker grew a little annoyed with his brother, Ugin, the Spirit Dragon, and battles him in the skies of Tarkir, a proper Planeswalker's Duel. Bolas strikes down his brother, and satisfied with the results, leaves to continue his work in Madara.

And Ugin dies, and his death takes with him the source of all Dragons on Tarkir, allowing for the rise of the Khans. He left work incomplete, including his plans to trap his brother with The Immortal Sun as well as his responsibilities in Zendikar (which led to other problems that are irrelevant here).

In the modern era of Magic, in the past few years, a Planeswalker named Sarkhan Vol entered into the service of Nicol Bolas, but eventually grew disillusioned and left him - though Bolas punished him by breaking his mind and takng him to madness. He traveled to his home plane of Tarkir, and journeyed, at the behest of Narset, Enlightened Master, who sought to aid him for his help in uncovering the secrets of Tarkir and the Multiverse, to the Tomb of the Spirit Dragon. There, he discovered the body of Ugin, and the lingering spirit of the one whose voice he had heard in his Madness - Ugin himself. Driven and drawn by the faint whispers of power primordial, Sarkhan reached the central Nexus of the Tomb, and stepped through.

He found himself in the distant past, shortly before the battle between the two God-Walkers. As an interesting side note, Sarkhan's Spark did not expand or become empowered by being a Planeswalker in the ear before the Mending. He was still himself. After a few (mis)adventures, Sarkhan evaded the efforts of Yasova Dragonclaw to manipulate him into helping slay Ugin, and after Bolas had left, he approached the dead-but-not-quite Ugin.

Unable to allow Bolas victory, and still taunted by the whispers in his head, he used a fragment of the Eye of Ugin, which he had taken from Zendikar when he helped release the Eldrazi, and unfolded it into a new Hedron that he could use to encase Ugin's body, protecting it from harm and allowing the Spirit Dragon the chance to heal from death, as Old Planeswalkers could do if protected.

But in saving Ugin's life, Sarkhan did what Urza had failed to do, and what Karn had failed to do correctly. He reforged the fate of Tarkir. With Ugin still alive, though healing and inside the Hedron, the Dragons of Tarkir were not extinguished, and the Khans never rose. Without the bones and Ugin's Nexus existing in the 'present', Sarkhan was snapped back to the 'now'.

And there, in the middle what should have been a Tomb, Ugin, the Ineffable appeared before him. The Spirit Dragon demanded and got answers from Sarkhan, thanking and apologizing for what he had done in the previous timeline. But Sarkhan was now an anomaly. In rewriting history, while the timeline tried to keep things as accurate as possible - Narset was still Narset, and his foe, Helmsmasher still lived, Sarkhan, who didn't exist in the timeline when it was reset, was passed over.

Sarkhan, for his effort in changing the timeline, became unattached from time, a living paradox. Sarkhan Unbroken was healed of his madness thanks to no longer having served under Bolas, yet retaining his sense of self, and his travel through time affected him, granting him a slight affinity for mana in the process.

I really should do a more in depth examination of him, he's actually an interesting character with a definitive arc to it.

Anyway, those are the only two people in Magic who have properly time traveled. Both instances were events with very specific end goals, where the temporally displaced person didn't just wander around doing what they wanted. And they returned once they had achieved their goals. But both had consequences for the traveler. Karn's bumbling in ignorance created a Time Rift that threatened to destroy the Multiverse, as well as putting into motion the events that would lead to another destruction of Tolaria before Barrin put it down for good. Sarkhan wiped out an entire timeline, killing untold millions, if not billions, and unshackled himself from temporal existence, which means that reality could catch up to him at any moment he is on Tarkir, his beloved home.

And now?

Teferi is going to try himself, to find someway to fight New Phyrexia properly, if not destroy them at their source. He's a man with knowledge, with power, and a goal in mind. If anyone can do it, he can.

But what price will he pay to himself in the process?

Join me next week, when I talk about something different. Maybe something about Dominaria United, maybe something else, I don't know yet.

Until then please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!