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By: mr_roskam, Jason C Roskam
Jul 29 2015 12:00pm
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Hello friends, strangers and everyone in between!  Mr. Roskam back again to talk more Magic Origins.  This week I want to talk about a card that has everyone talking (bad and good), and that card is none other than Day’s Undoing!

Day's Undoing

Day’s Undoing seems to be the most polarizing card in all of Magic Origins and for good reason. This is another attempt to make a “fair” version of Timetwister and seems to have a large amount of downside on paper. The fact that your opponent gets the Timetwister effect as well hurts bad enough, but the real kicker is the “end the turn” clause. This effect ensures that you will be unable to play lands, activate Planeswalkers, and cast none of the seven cards you just drew. In the right deck and cast at the right time, this is not necessarily a deal-breaker.

 

Day’s Undoing in Standard

There are a great deal of people who believe this card to be unplayable. In a Standard environment I’m inclined to agree, for the most part. The last thing you want to do against a deck like Abzan is to allow them to draw seven new cards and ending your turn if they already have cards like Fleecemane Lion, Rakshasa Deathdealer or Siege Rhino already on the board. You then give them the chance to fill up with hand disruption and then cast (Thoughtsieze) to strip your hand of the best cards that you just drew. Some trains of thought say it can be fine in a control deck if you cast it with 2-3 mana available to cast a counterspell on your opponent’s turn. There has also been a great deal of talk about splashing blue in Burn decks, allowing you to refill your hand on turn 3 or 4 and finish off your opponent. In Standard, I feel that Day’s Undoing is going to be clunky and will only get played in combo decks such as the Jeskai Ascendancy variants. The place where Day’s Undoing is really going to shine is in the eternal formats such as Modern and Legacy. In fact, when I saw the spoiler for Day’s Undoing, my eyes lit up and I was immediately taken back to two years ago when I was playing this little gem in Modern:

Let’s do the Time Warp again!

Turbo Time Warp (Pre Origins)
Let's do the Time Warp again!
Creatures
0 cards

Other Spells
2 Jace Beleren
4 Time Warp
4 Walk the Aeons
4 Temporal Mastery
4 Sleight of Hand
3 Telling Time
1 Elixir of Immortality
4 Howling Mine
4 Remand
4 Cryptic Command
2 Trickbind
2 Tectonic Edge
38 cards
Lands
22 Island
22 cards

 

 

Turbo Time Warp had a brief moment in the sun mostly on MTGO. I saw the decklist in an article and immediately fell in love with it and knew I had to play it! I put the deck together in paper and online and absolutely loved it. It perfectly represented the types of deck that I prefer to play: An archetype that nobody else in the room is playing, using cards that people have to actually read! Before this deck hit, very few people knew what cards like Walk the Aeons actually did. The point of the deck is fairly simple in theory: Get at least one draw engine on the board (Howling Mine, Jace Beleren) and start taking extra turns over and over until you can tick Jace up to his ultimate ability multiple times and force your opponent to draw out their entire deck. Seems fun, right?

 

Not all fun and games

The deck certainly has some negatives and bad matchups, otherwise it would not have disappeared as quickly as it appeared. The deck needs to survive until at least turn 5 before it can start combo-ing off. Disruption such as counterspells further increase the amount of time it takes to establish a board and start taking nearly infinite turns. It can definitely hold its own against creature-based decks with the inclusion of Cryptic Command to tap down their potential attackers and buying you another turn. Burn is another story. Cards like Goblin Guide and Monastery Swiftspear on turn 1 are bad news because the deck has no way to deal with them. They cannot be countered by anything in the main, and will get through with a ton of damage over 3-4 turns. The best hope against hyper aggressive decks like this are to get an early Miracle trigger on Temporal Mastery and hope to start combo-ing off earlier in the game.

Despite some glaring bad matchups, the worst part of playing Turbo Time Warp has nothing to do with the actual games being played, but the interactions (or lack thereof) with your opponent. If anyone remembers when “Eggs” was still a legal deck in Modern, it was NOT fun to play against, or even really to watch. Anyone playing around that time probably remembers the Grand Prix where Brian Kibler was playing against the Eggs deck and eventually just got up and walked away to go use the bathroom. He asked the judge on-hand to continue watching his opponent as he was going through action after action to slowly grind his way to a victory. Playing Turbo Time Warp is unfortunately a very similar experience for your opponents. If you get to a point where you can start going off, you’re just taking turn after turn, trying to ensure you keep hitting your extra turns, ticking up your Jace, and slowly building up to a victory.

In the Tournament Practice room on MTGO, you can almost never finish a match with this deck because opponents will concede long before it is over, and I can’t say I blame them. I also had an experience where I was playing against a good friend at a paper Modern event and he just kind of glared at me as I’m taking turn after turn, trying to eke out a win, and I could just tell he was not happy and not having any fun. It was just after that experience that I decided to stop playing the deck. Even if it was a deck that I always could win with, it still was not worth it when I essentially forced the life out of my opponent and made it a very unpleasant experience for them. I’ve been trying to play Magic competitively for nearly 4 years now, and as time goes on, I’ve grown far less concerned about winning and more about having fun and enjoying these new friendships I have made through this game.

 

However ………………

Day’s Undoing has got me wanting to play this deck again, if only at a more competitive level to see if maybe Day’s Undoing is the final piece of the puzzle to turn Turbo Time Warp into a legitimate deck. One of the key pieces of the original TTW deck is Elixir of Immortality. It allows you to shuffle your Time Warp, Walk the Aeons and other cards back into your library, so you can continue taking additional turns with them as you are working towards your combo. Day’s Undoing does that job while ALSO drawing you 7 more cards. “But it ends your turn!” you say, and you are correct, however if you cast it after you just, say, hit a Miracle Temporal Mastery, you still get to take that extra turn after the one just ended by Day’s Undoing! And as you start getting deeper and deeper into your combo, Day’s Undoing just gets better and better as you can start hard casting cards like Time Warp and Walk the Aeons and still have enough mana left to cast Day’s Undoing afterwards. It ensures that you’ll continue drawing your extra turn cards, when before, you always had that chance to brick and draw nothing, forcing you to pass the turn back to your opponent which could prove to be fatal. Day’s Undoing increases your chances to continue taking extra turns significantly.

 

Elixir or no?

A major problem in the old TTW deck is if your Elixir of Immortality somehow ended up in the graveyard either through being milled away or some type of disenchant effect, you’re royal screwed! Without the ability to reshuffle your deck, the chances of winning are almost zero. Now that Day’s Undoing will be added to the deck, it will contain multiple “reshuffle” effects. The real question is going to be whether or not to continue running Elixir or just going with all Day’s Undoing. The problem with the second option is that Day’s Undoing gets exiled, so you’ve only got a maximum of four shuffle effects. So right now I’m leaning towards keeping the singleton Elixir and playing 3 Day’s Undoing. Once Origins actually releases, I’ll experiment with running 2, 3 and 4 copies of Day’s until I find a good balance.

 

Let’s go to the video ……….

I recently streamed this deck in a Modern tournament on MTGO and recorded as I streamed. I did a single-elimination, 5-3-2-2 event. Let’s see how the pre-Origins build stacks up.

Deck Tech:

 

The deck tech here speaks for itself.

Round 1:

Oh man, I was SO happy to beat Boggles! As an incredibly aggressive deck, it was a good challenge to see if I could stand up to it. And the Trickbind in Game 1 may have very well saved it for me. However I think Shadow of Doubt would have been just as good, if not better. Some VERY lucky Miracle triggers from Temporal Mastery helped seal the deal!

Round 2:

Wow. So even after screwing up and forgetting about Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and the reshuffle trigger, I was lucky enough to be able to win with Laboratory Maniac in Game 2. Remand is such a critical card in this matchup, because keeping Tron from resolving a turn 3 Karn Liberated is so crucial to surviving the matchup! Despite some misplays, I feel like I have a very favorable matchup against Tron, especially when they sideboard out the Pyroclasm! This brings up an interesting problem with the deck. I should probably be running the Laboratory Maniac in the main, and a couple of Surgical Extraction in the sideboard.

Finals:

Yeah, this is exactly the kind of deck that I can't really deal with. A tempo deck with fast, aggressive creatures and countermagic is just too much to handle without some lucky breaks. Though I still feel great about how the deck performed and am looking forward to modifying it once Origins is officially released on MTGO.

 

In closing:

With Origins hitting MTGO in about a week, I’m very excited for both my Standard and Modern decks! I’ve played my Standard UW Control deck in paper already and it feels so good with the new Jace! I’m also determined to break Day’s Undoing in Modern, and this could be the first step! From the start, I'm planning on going with a full 4 Day's Undoing.  I'll be removing the two Trickbinds and two of the Telling Time.  I'll keep you all updated as I keep revising the deck.  I hope you all enjoyed the deck and my videos, please shoot any feedback my way. You can email me or hit me up on Twitter, and as always, if you want more content from me or you just want to hear my beautiful voice, go check out the Higher Standards Podcast on the MTGCast Network! Thanks for ready!

Be good, kids!

Mr. Jason Roskam

jcroskam@gmail.com

@Roskam76

4 Comments

Amidst all of the other decks by Procrastination at Wed, 07/29/2015 - 21:29
Procrastination's picture
5

Amidst all of the other decks people have talked about slotting Day's into in Modern, oddly enough, Time Warp hasn't been one of them. I'm intrigued to see where it could go?

Also, if you don't mind the linkage, this is the article I wrote about the Time Warp deck on this very site way back in 2013. Your pre-Origins build is similar to this one, so for those that want to learn more about how to use, and how to fight, the deck, be sure to check it out.

http://puremtgo.com/articles/modern-perspective-studying-time-walk

Very enjoyable article. I by olaw at Thu, 07/30/2015 - 08:29
olaw's picture
5

Very enjoyable article. I haven't been able to watch all the videos yet but the bits I've seen were entertaining.

This is a deck I've been interested in trying for a while but fell off my radar eventually.

I hadn't thought about using Day's Undoing in this kind of deck but it does seem like an excellent home - negating the end of turn stipulation. However, you are going to have to find an alternative win condition as Day's Undoing shuffles your opponent's graveyard too (unless you plan to exile their graveyard somehow). I suppose you can just move Laboratory Maniac to the main to help resolve that.

I'm not sure on the number of Day's Undoing you want but I imagine it is quite low, probably just 1 or 2, because I really don't think you want to cast it until you are going off (though I could be wrong). It helps prolong your combo but I don't think it's a good way to set it up.

Thanks for the feedback, by mr_roskam at Thu, 07/30/2015 - 15:33
mr_roskam's picture

Thanks for the feedback, guys! Since writing this article and making the videos, I've acquired my copies of Day's Undoing and have been testing it in TTW as a 3-of. I think I'm ready to go down to 2. 3 seemed a bit unnecessary. I need more cards to help protect myself leading up to "going off". Day's Undoing just helps to keep the combo rolling once I've stabilized.

Hey, came across this list by Procrastination at Thu, 08/06/2015 - 21:41
Procrastination's picture
5

Hey, came across this list that got 8th place at an SCG IQ. Lots of cool card choices in it, but still a Time Warp shell at heart: http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/displaydeck.php?DeckID=88322.