First, I want to make it explicitly clear that as I write this article, I have no idea what the contents of MED4 are. Apparently, there is a small following out there who think I've got an inside track on MTGO trade secrets and an NDA over my head, but I assure you I do not. (Actually, now that I write that, I should look up the NDA verbiage that I signed last year to go to Renton.)

Today I want to talk to you about Time Vault. Oh Time Vault. I will never forget the day the only person I ever knew who owned this card back in 1994 played Animate Artifact and Instill Energy on it, thereby giving him infinite turns. I remember quite clearly that was the day I realized that some things in Magic are just broken. Keep in mind that this was early enough in 1994 that the Banned and Restricted List hadn't even hit our corner yet, and when he has 4 Demonic Tutors in his deck, and your deck is taking till turn 5 or 6 before it really gets going with your awesome Tawnos's Coffin/Xenic Poltergeist/Control Magic Combo, getting a 3 card infinite turn combo out of such a deck isn't nearly as hard as it would be today.

Fast forward many years, and Time Vault has undergone a number of changes by way of its oracle-wording – the be all end all of magic rules interpretation for sanctioned events, and more importantly, how everything works on MTGO. The list of changes is long, but to sum up it went from being banned , then changed in Oracle to useless, to being an instant win with Flame Fusillade, back to being useless, then finally becoming a monster, infinite turn combo with Voltaic Key – a 2 card, 3 mana (+1 mana to activate) infinite turn combo – made out of nothing but artifacts, the easiest thing to get and play in the Magic Universe. This latest incarnation was brought to you by Stephen Menedian running into Richard Garfield at an event somewhere and getting him to admit on record that the original intent of the wording of the card was that it would combo with things like Twiddle, thus sealing the deal in Stephen's crusade to have Mark Gottlieb make the Oracle wording as he believed it was intended.

Let me just prelude my coming arguments that I don't believe there is any arguing with Stephen's logic or Richard Garfield's memory. The first is damn good and the second is irrefutable anyway, so I will say that the record stands that Time Vault was apparently meant to be this way.

However, let's look at Time Vault as printed

That's some pretty ambiguous wording – pretty much everyone will admit that.

Now, I thought I would produce some tournament results with ridiculous numbers of Time Vaults, but I decided against it because:

a) Finding Vintage tournament results without deckcheck.net is a messy proposition
b) I'm not sure I want to make the focal argument contained herein that Time Vault is omni-present in winning decklists because that would be a poor statement for what I'm proposing anyway. There is a litany of cards that are practically omnipresent in winning decklists in Vintage – they mostly reside on the restricted list.

Still, just as it did way back when Animate Artifact and Instill Energy ruined my day, there is something that sticks in my craw about Time Vault today that makes me want to reject it's very existence. I'm not sure I can articulate why that is. I think it is specific to the combo itself. It's certainly not a two-card low-mana cost combo that bothers me. Painter and Grindstone don't bother me. Oath and Orchard don't bother me. False Cure and Beacon of Immortality certainly don't bother me. Stuffy Doll and Guilty Conscience don't bother me. Why, then, does Time Vault combo bother me so much?

I think it's the infinite turns thing. There are two problems with it being so pervasive. The first I'll make in comparison to Painter/Grindstone, which I think is the closest mirror to Vault/Key. The problems with Painter/Grindstone is of course that Painter is super fragile, and neither card is very good on it's own. While you can do some cute tricks with Painter apart from Grindstone, it pales in comparison to what you can do with untapping an artifact every turn with Key, and so randomly hitting either part of Painter/Grindstone until you get both aren't helping you achieve your game state. Secondly, it's possible to have something like Emrakul in your graveyard and run into a draw - you don't lose the game against the Painter combo, or Gaea's Blessing, which will trigger afterward and you'll have a nice full library when all is said and done. That is, you can actually defeat the combo even if it should go off. This is very different from Time Vault, and it's probably what bother's me most. Time Vault isn't putting you in a winning state. It's simply making it impossible for the opponent to achieve theirs, and giving you all the time you need to get to yours. While certain situations are possible to set up where the opponent taking all the turns will not let them achieve their win state (like Stasis + Frozen Aether), they are all highly unlikely to be achieved with a competitive vintage deck. Thus, there is no real way that the combo will ever lose if it activates.   Then start coupling in all the other factors – easy to assemble, cheap to play and activate, etc… Time Vault bothers me this way.

However, let's say I've not convinced you on those merits alone. You are a die-hard Vintage player and you are beholden to it's mantra of purism and allowing at least one of everything, right? You are enamoured of powerful cards and devastating combos and just what the hell is Null Rod good for anyway, right?

I might suggest you've forgotten something. You see, this article is concerned mostly with the possible release of Time Vault in MED4. That means online, folks. I can't believe that nobody has brought this up before now (at least as far as I can tell) but haven't we all learned our lessons about infinite combos and the chess-clock online? I don't care how much you enjoy Time Vault in paper, the fact of the matter is that online, Time Vault will cause nothing less than the lengthening of matches where Player A (who has Time Vault / Key in play) gets time-griefed as player B makes him play out every agonizing phase as they click their way into the inevitable win for Player A. Can't you see it? Pass your upkeep, click on the meaningless Oath trigger, Draw a card… play a land. Play a spell to search for your win. Tap your key, untap your Vault, tap your Vault… repeat. And please don't pretend that there won't be people who hope to hell that the person forgets to untap Vault on the 14th iteration, or that Dark Confidant will magically kill a the player before they find a way to win… it will happen. It happened a long time ago with Worldgorger Dragon (pre Leyline/Dredge, this combo was marginally effective in classic) and it will definitely happen with Vault too. Except, of course that this time people would be foolish to not play with Vault whereas almost no one played Dragon. So everyone will suffer through this every single round of every tournament Time Vault is legal in.

Menedian once advocated for the banning of Yawgmoth's Will, and I think he had a good motivation (the benefit of Vintage community, and specifically, opening up deck design). Ultimately, I think his arguments fell on deaf ears because banning cards for power-level reasons in Vintage is a slippery slope. However, I'm going to reinvigorate that argument except this time, I don't want to ban Vault. Banning it would be just as poor a decision as banning Will could have been. What I would rather do is admit that yes, while Time Vault was intended to allow all sorts of untapping trickery, it's simply not healthy for the game with Time Vault existing in that state. And should Time Vault appear in MED4, it is my hope that Time Vault will once again be changed by the Oracle Giants (in this case an almost literal giant, the 6'9" WoTC rules manager Matt Tabak) to perform in a manner inconsistent with the original intention of the card.

"But," you might holler, "that's just pseudo-banning the card". You know what - you'd be right. However, in this case there isn't a slippery slope. Simply put, there is a very small group of cards that are so ambiguously worded as Time Vault and another small handful that could actually cause the same kinds of problems as Time Vault to realistically worry that there could possibly be another candidate for this type of action.  The next best example is Flash, and I hardly think that we need to worry that one day WoTC will make a creature that when leaves play will trigger endless turns for the player who plays it. While technically I suppose it's possible to make such a card, or to perhaps come up with another example (with say, Transmute Artifact), it seems highly unlikely, whereas another card entering Vintage and becoming the central point of most deck design in the way Yawgmoth's Will did back in 2007 seems far more likely to happen again.

I bring this all up of course, because WoTC has a history of applying new Oracle wordings for these cards when they are released in MED sets online. Look no further than the fact that Illusionary Mask was given the treatment (though I don't think in that case it was for power level reasons, but mostly to keep a consistency with face-down cards) as an example. There is no way the original Mask brought out 2/2 creatures. And I don't think many people will remember that with MED2 they changed how Animate Dead, Necromancy and Dance of the Dead all worked to make them more in line with expectations and intent when Dance of the Dead was brought online (in case you were wondering, it became impossible to use those cards as a one-sided Exhume on creatures with Protection from Black or Enchantments, like Akroma, where as it was possible to do so before). While I fully accept that the case of Time Vault is different than the others, the fact remains that if there is to be a time to "fix" Time Vault from being what I consider a small black mark on the Vintage and possibly soon Classic meta, the time is might be rapidly upon us.