But that does nothing to show how often the combo is relevant in-game
Well clearly, how did you expect me to pull this off, haha?
I can just speak from personal experience and tell you that when you're a full-functioning Time Vault deck, unless you're drawing Voltaic Key + nothing else of relevance (or Time Vault + no tutors, card selection, draw7s, enablers etc), you're going to be happy you picked up the pieces.
or how often Vault is a dead card in the draft
Well, if we're assuming people are taking the card and drafting around it (which happens very often here) when it's opened 1st pack, then that's 33% of the time right off the bat. In the second pack (66% of the time) Time Vault also gets drafted into the deck that wants it. 33% of the time in the last pack, it's significantly worse (just like Worldknit), but again, speaking from experience, Time Vault gets maindecked 50% of the time with 2 enablers. With 3, it would be above 50% of the time I'm sure.
or how often the support cards are unused in drafts
Well, if Time Vault is being maindecked ~50% of the time, I'd assume the enablers are getting maindecked that often too. Ral Zarek and Tezzeret have uses outside of just Time Vault, so the percentage on them goes up for sure. Voltaic Key is a dud a lot of times (I've never argued otherwise), but I think it's worth it to add a deck to the cube.
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or how often one half of the combo whiffs in-game, or any of the other relevant data that showed how utterly terrible Time Vault was in the cube.
Okay. All I did this for was to experiment with if the deck would come together often enough, and I knew because of my experience at 360 with 2 enablers (and 3), that it certainly would. Using the methods above, I think my conclusions met my hypothesis pretty well
Just because you can build a deck with 1-2 enablers in it doesn't mean that the combo is actually good, or that the deck itself wouldn't have been better off with something else entirely (which is what we found to clearly be the case).
Okay. Well, I have years of playing experience on you with the combo, and I can wholeheartedly say that the combo is good, and the deck itself is rarely better off with something else entirely. The drafts actually do help here with the latter part of this statement.
I'd be more comfortable playing those drafted decks with something besides Time Vault/Key in them, until they can go into a deck that has a huge percent chance of going infinite with Vault every time it's drawn, which probably requires somewhere around 4 enablers in the same deck as it.
Are you counting enablers + tutors + draw7s + card selection? You really don't need 4 enablers in any of the above decks I just posted, they all have enough tutors, card draw/selection, and draw7s to get there nearly every single game.
Your goal with those videos seemed to be showing how often the card can get drafted alongside 1-2 enablers. That does nothing for me, as that wasn't enough enablers to actually make the card perform well in-game.
I just took out three cards to put in Time Vault + Key + Tezzeret, I didn't have the goal of anything besides showing viewers how Time Vault would look with those enabler numbers.
Also sports: Dig Through Time, Fact or Fiction, Faithless Looting, Brainstorm, Magma Jet, Snapcaster Mage, Looter Il-Kor, Enclave Cryptologist, Mystical Tutor.
Yeah, that one is getting there too. Three enablers, a draw 7, and a ton of ways to find all that stuff.
Also sports: Dig Through Time, Condescend, Deep Analysis, Booster Tutor, Faithless Looting, Mystical Tutor.
Yeah, third one is getting there too. All these decks would be fine at hitting Time Vault + something else pretty easily in most of its games. I'm speaking out of experience here based on what Time Vault decks I think would be successful vs. Time Vault decks I think would be unsuccessful, and all of these would have high win percentages.
Again, these are just Time Vault decks that I made up in this little experiment. There are lots of decks that don't look like this but would still like Time Vault in them. I was just going more-or-less balls-to-the-walls Time Vault combo enablers to show how good the decks can look. I wanted to make reanimator work as a substrategy for one of these games, but didn't quite get there (although I think that was due to me mispicking cards).
I think the decks speak well-enough for themselves. I'd like to do more later, not sure if I will though.
Well, I have years of playing experience on you with the combo, and I can wholeheartedly say that the combo is good
How do you know that, lol? I've been drafting cubes with the Vault combo in them since 2008 when Tezz came out to bolster it. I have years of playing experience on you with the combo, and I can wholeheartedly say that the combo needs more enablers before it'll be good.
How do you know that, lol? I've been drafting cubes with the Vault combo in them since 2008 when Tezz came out to bolster it. I have years of playing experience on you with the combo, and I can wholeheartedly say that the combo needs more enablers before it'll be good.
Really? If you've dismissed it in the Ral Zarek era, why would you think I assumed you were cubing with it pre-Ral? The deck was worse pre-Ral.
I have never seen Time Vault in any of your lists, and you just said the last time you played it was pre-Ral.
So, assuming you took out Time Vault when Ral Zarek was spoiled (May 2013), that gives you from 2008-early 2013 of experience with Time Vault. I find it really odd that you would take it out right when Ral Zarek got spoiled though (it would encourage you to keep it in even moreso), so I'm guessing you actually weren't playing with it since 2012, possibly even 2011.
I've been cubing Time Vault since I made my first 540 back in 2009 and we've kept it in for the entirety (with a few short exceptions) since then. There is no way that you need 6 enablers in a 360 card cube to support this combo, and I think the decks above prove that point well enough.
So unless you've been secretly drafting with Time Vault every week for years now, I'd be really surprised if you have battled with Time Vault as often as anyone in my playgroup (2009-almost 2015 now).
EDIT: I just checked your set updates (dating back to Worldwake, January 2010) and "Change Log" (dating back to November 2009) and found no control+F of "Time Vault." I did find cuts of Boomerang, Forcefield, Time Warp, etc, so I would have assumed you'd be adding and cutting Time Vault as well. If your updates are accurate, you may have tried it from 2008-2009? We've been cubing Time Vault every (often twice or more on Tues/Fri, and twice or more sometimes weekends and occasionally weekdays) from 2009-now (almost 2015).
Not every card that gets tested/played goes in as an official change. And my cube list isn't the only local cube that gets played, either.
At this point, we simply have to agree to disagree. Your experiences lead you to liking the card, and mine don't. End of story. Your results tell you it's good enough now. My results tell me we need more enablers before it can a regular contributor to winning strategies.
The most common use for Time Vault is to take advantage of board states that are even or favorable to you. If your opponent cannot favorably attack you, skipping your turn actually can give you a significant advantage. Storing that turn up for when you have a favorable attack will give you an extra attack step with little cost to you. Not a lot of people recognize that and never skip their turn when they have Time Vault in play.
Time Vault also allows you to punish your opponent for keeping up Countermagic instead of playing spells. If your opponent passes with 4 lands untapped, and you skip your turn, he just wasted tons of mana and you gained an enormous amount of tempo. It also allows you to force through threats when he does keep countermagic up in the future, since if he keeps it up again, you just play a threat, then tap Time Vault to take another turn, untap all your mana, and play another threat.
Based on this, would you generally advise playing Time Vault in a generic blue control deck or some kind of midrange deck without enablers on these types of plays? I'm not arguing for/against it with enablers but genuinely curious as this part piqued my interest as a standalone card.
Just because you can build a deck with 1-2 enablers in it doesn't mean that the combo is actually good, or that the deck itself wouldn't have been better off with something else entirely (which is what we found to clearly be the case).
The last Time Vault deck I drafted had 2 infinites (Tezzeret and Ral Zarek) and Pestermite. I had 0 tutors (unless you count Tezz), but instead had digging and card draw like Impulse, Fact or Fiction, Thirst for Knowledge, Ancestral Vision, etc etc. I lost 1 game, and it was because I was 1 mana short of playing the Vault and Ral Zarek on the same turn when my opponent had on-board lethal. In this recent example, alongside the dozens of other times I've drafted the deck, there was never an issue of finding the combo. Tutors and card draw in a 40 card deck go a long way to reduce the variance involved. So does aggressively mulliganing. And make no mistake, I don't just draft decks with the Time Vault combo, I draft Time Vault decks. So it's pretty silly for me to envision any of those decks with different cards in place of the combo -- not unless it was a Kiki combo or a Sneak Attack combo or some other 2-piece game-ending interaction. But Inferno Titan or Tamiyo or "something else entirely"? No way would those decks be able to assemble a turn 4 win with consistency like a good Time Vault deck should.
Based on this, would you generally advise playing Time Vault in a generic blue control deck or some kind of midrange deck without enablers on these types of plays? I'm not arguing for/against it with enablers but genuinely curious as this part piqued my interest as a standalone card.
I only play Time Vault in a deck that has at least 1 enabler in it. My playgroup has played Time Vault + Key in probably every single archetype in my cube. I don't think that's correct, haha, but people around here love Vault + Key. Like I said before, I'd actually rather cut it, but the people I play with have just associated it with my cube (I was the first to make a cube around here), so it's just stuck and they've complained when I took it out for a week or two here or there.
Time Vault is not a good standalone card. When it's on the battlefield and it doesn't prompt a concession, it's misplayed well over 50% of the time, but it's definitely not good enough to stand on its own.
Time Vault does have some interesting plays where your opponent passes with a weak board position and counterspells/instants up. It feels so good to just "bank" a turn when your opponent did nothing. But that's definitely not good enough to warrant standing alone, IMO. You're paying a card and a turn, so it's actually win-more at that point since you had a dominant board position to begin with.
The best players in my playgroup will play Time Vault correctly, but it's actually one of the more difficult cards to play since you have to ask every time your opponent passes the turn "Is it better if I just skip my next one?" Sometimes skipping that turn allows your opponent to actually recover better than they otherwise would have (like if they play a Moat -- you would have gotten in some damage the turn you skipped, but now you can't).
The last Time Vault deck I drafted had 2 infinites (Tezzeret and Ral Zarek) and Pestermite. I had 0 tutors (unless you count Tezz), but instead had digging and card draw like Impulse, Fact or Fiction, Thirst for Knowledge, Ancestral Vision, etc etc. I lost 1 game, and it was because I was 1 mana short of playing the Vault and Ral Zarek on the same turn when my opponent had on-board lethal.
Wtwlf123 probably doesn't believe you here, but I do. Sometimes you just get lucky with Time Vault + Enabler, and it's easily the fastest 2-card-kill in any cube (Vault + Key in particular). Tezzeret is just a 1-card-combo because you don't even need to ever see Time Vault when you're playing with Tezz.
In this recent example, alongside the dozens of other times I've drafted the deck, there was never an issue of finding the combo. Tutors and card draw in a 40 card deck go a long way to reduce the variance involved. So does aggressively mulliganing.
Completely agree. Conspiracies (Backup Plan, Double Stroke, Iterative Analysis) go an even longer way to making sure Time Vault players can find their pieces. Black tutors are really the most broken elements of the deck, since they're as close to a Wild Card in cube as you can get.
And make no mistake, I don't just draft decks with the Time Vault combo, I draft Time Vault decks. So it's pretty silly for me to envision any of those decks with different cards in place of the combo -- not unless it was a Kiki combo or a Sneak Attack combo or some other 2-piece game-ending interaction. But Inferno Titan or Tamiyo or "something else entirely"? No way would those decks be able to assemble a turn 4 win with consistency like a good Time Vault deck should.
At this point, we simply have to agree to disagree. Your experiences lead you to liking the card, and mine don't. End of story. Your results tell you it's good enough now. My results tell me we need more enablers before it can a regular contributor to winning strategies.
It's not just me though, it's everyone on this thread (save you) that has played with Time Vault for any extended period of time and a decent amount of enablers.
You also haven't played with Time Vault in your cube since adding conspiracies. They help a lot. Even just Power Play is actually an incredibly strong card in Time Vault, since you're going for quick wins here most of the time and ignoring what your opponent is doing in a committed Vault deck.
I think you should test it since now you have access to:
That's a lot of cards that the Time Vault decks love.
Adding Tezzeret the Seeker will also give you more critical mass towards another deck archetype that I know you like -- the artifact deck. Having more decks in cube is sweet.
I mean, check out this deck I made by drafting your cube: http://www.cubetutor.com/cubedeck/217384 (Chaos Orb = Time Vault, Super Secret Tech = Voltaic Key). Brago's Favor and Unexpected Potential are on Ral Zarek there. You don't think that deck would do well? I think it would crush.
It's not just me though, it's everyone on this thread (save you) that has played with Time Vault for any extended period of time and a decent amount of enablers.
It's not just me. There are a ton of cube managers that don't cube with Time Vault because it's too narrow.
They're all just smarter than me and decided to avoid this discussion like the plague.
I love Time Vault, I play the hell out of it in Vintage. There will come a day where its inclusion is easier for me because there's enough additional support for it that it's a "free" slot. I look forward to that. And until then, I'm confidant that excluding it is the right decision for my cube.
I have been playing Time Vault in my 540 cube since I made it back in 2009.
I've had some untap enablers in my cube, can't remember all of them, at some point even Toils of Night and Day was in there. Voltaic Key was never there tho..
Now, none of these cards are bad on their own and will be in my cube regardless of Time Vault so there's no discussion about adding useless card to make Time Vault work, but the problem is that Time Vault is useless on its own. And for that reason I'm finally cutting it from my cube. Lately I haven't seen the combo being played, so either the combo doesn't get drafted together or the player doesn't think he can use the combo consistent enough to include it in the deck. Either way, it's a special card, but I'll finally sell it as I think my cube will be fine without it. It helps that the value of the card has multiplied 6 times since I bought it ;-)
At some point there was a Time Vault deck someone drafted. He played Tezzeret and Ral Zarek. There were a few turn 3 concessions (T2 Time Vault, T3 Ral Zarek with a Mox or Sol Ring), he won the draft. Overall the deck was very solid and consistent with Timetwister and Wheel of Fortune. We'll always have that memory ;-)
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"Everybody dies, Tracey. Someone's carrying a bullet for you right now, doesn't even know it. The trick is to die of old age before it finds you."
So, I've actually seen the Time Vault combo in action in some videos since the new Holiday Cube has been up, which have plenty of ways to untap the Vault.
Here's one where Paul Cheon from Channelfireball.com drafts a deck that can abuse Time Vault:
All these decks could obviously be optimized more for Time Vault, but pretty interesting that basically every holiday cube draft I've seen involves Time Vault in one way or another.
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I feel like this year's holiday cube is by far the closest version of the cube I've seen to the cubes I've built.
All I've heard about this iteration of the Cube is how dumb Time Vault is and how it has all sorts of loose cards that don't stand much on their own to support it. (Kiora's Follower?!? Please.)
Had a Time Vault in my Cube for a while pre-Ral and I was not a fan. Either you didn't get the enablers you needed and wasted an early pick, or you had to draft and play a bunch of narrow suboptimal cards that were unimpressive when you didn't resolve Time Vault, or you had a 2-card instawin combo in a fun casual format.
None of those options appealed to me, so I cut it. With the holiday Cube feedback, I'm even less interested than before even though there are at least 1-2 good cards that can stand alone (I don't believe for a second that KF or Voltaic Key and the like are good standalone cards, for reference.) I don't mind using more narrow cards to support broader/more archetypes, but I won't do it for a 2-card instawin combo. That's not my definition of fun, and it reminds me a lot of trying to draft the mono-black strategy in Cube (the black mana matters/swamps matters type) where you wind up with a bunch of terrible cards if you don't get enough of them.
I'm sure it is plenty powerful, of course, for those who have a strong fun metric = power and combos like that. It's just not fun or flexible enough for me without running terrible cards.
It just reinforced what I already knew about the card. If you add in a bunch of terrible enablers, you can make another terrible card good. If you cut those bad enablers, you're left with a combo that is super inconsistent, and no longer justifies running the Vault. Once I have a few more more Tezz/Ral quality enablers, it'll be worth another round of testing. But if it means running cards like Key and Kiora's Follower ...I can do without.
As a Cube designer, you always work with design goals. Without those goals it would not be possible to make decisions about which cards to include and even how many cards.
For the Magic Online Holiday Cube, the design goal is to create an environment where you can play combo. In order to achieve that, it is perfectly reasonable to include Time Vault and enablers, including arguably narrow ones like Voltaic Key and Kiora's Follower.
For AA, the design goal is to create an environment which he describes as a fun, casual format. There is no room for two card instant-win combos in that environment, including Time Vault would therefore be a very bad idea because it is either just a bad card nobody wants to play or it actively works against the design goal.
Personally, I want to support combo to some extent because I like to enable different strategies (aggro, midrange, control, combo). The sweet spot for me is an environment where drafting dedicated combo is possible, but risky. I hate linear archetypes with a passion (the swamps matter archetype AA mentioned is a good example for that), so most of my combo pieces should be playable on their own in non-combo decks. A prime example is reanimator. I have experimented with other combos as well and I am sure that one day I will be interested in adding the Time Vault combo. Not now, though, because with only Tezzeret the Seeker and Ral Zarek as enablers, chances are you will not see an enabler in the whole draft after picking Time Vault. At least one more enabler is needed for me to consider the addition of Time Vault, I think.
It depends on the size of the cube. We tested out the combo with only the vault/key as 'narrow' cards. It's legit for sure but we didn't like how it was playing out at the time so it sits on the on deck box. As Konfusius says, design goals.
I don't like Time Vault in cube basically for the reasons that have been stated already. First and foremost, though, I'm not a fan of instawin combos in cube. I like power and fast mana and big cheats, but "you're never getting another turn" is real lame, IMO. At least if my opponent gets a turn three monster, I have the opportunity to find a piece of removal or bounce or something. Even a Mind Twist for your hand can be beat.
I've also seen a few videos of the pros drafting cube and talking about how good Time Vault is. I love watching these guys draft, but I don't normally trust their judgment when it comes to cube worthy cards. Good players do not always make for good cube managers.
I've also seen a few videos of the pros drafting cube and talking about how good Time Vault is. I love watching these guys draft, but I don't normally trust their judgment when it comes to cube worthy cards. Good players do not always make for good cube managers.
The bolded is definitely true, but in this case I agree completely with the "good players", in the sense that once the decision is made to include Time Vault, two "good" enablers and two "bad" enablers (+ the Twin combo package which offers some crossover synergies), it becomes one of the best cards in the Cube to draft and play.
I've done about 15 of the Holiday Cube drafts, and the best draft strategy is Blue and Red, not close. This Cube is defined by "doing broken stuff" (be it Eldrazi Ramp, Reanimator, Artifacts synergies or individually broken cards like Balance and Mind Twist), and having Blue for card drawing/selection and counterspells sort of trumps anything the broken decks are doing. By pairing Red with Blue, you gain access to almost all the broken combo's that are seeded into the Cube, and Time Vault is the best one of those. You really only need one other combo piece, since the rest of your deck is filled with card draw and counterspell, so you'll find the combo eventually.
In addition, U/R offers Twin, Artifacts.dec and Wildfire.dec, or you can splash Black and go Grixis Reanimator. And the "ace in the hole" is the Burn Combo deck. In about half the drafts, Red turns out to be wide open and you can move into the 12-Bolts deck. Aggro decks in general are bad options, since you can't consistently kill the broken decks before they do something terrible to you, but if you get enough burn spells (possibly splashing things like Snapcaster Mage, Power 9 pieces and 1-drop library manipulation), you end up with a deck where all of the cards literally do the same thing, and that kills on turn ~4.5 with frightening consistency.
So anyway, this is a bit of a derail, but Time Vault is amazing in the MTGO Holiday Cube. That doesn't say much on the question of it actually being a good inclusion in the list (or any other), of course, since it is a really "dumb" card that gives out free wins like no other.
it's nice to have a combo in the cube, but I prefer including twin/Kiki combos since most of the individual pieces are playable on their own. I've run time vault in the past, but the decks that ran it were so uninteractive that I cut it.
Yep. I've also seen it fail a ton of times too, and that cube is playing every terrible card that can untap it to enable it, which I think is a bad design choice regardless of how well it enables the Vault itself. It's not a matter of "can I go ultimate with this card" because of course you can. But whether or not it's a good idea for the cube is a different story. I'd rather use better cards in my cube and not have this random infinite combo than enable Vault with a bunch of garbage. The Kiki combo has more than enough tools to reliably go ultimate too, but I don't play it because I don't want to saturate the cube with a bunch of cards that are terrible on their own, no matter how viable it makes a random combo.
The thing about the MTGO powered cube is that it is designed to be full of air. Tutors, draw engines, millions of mana rocks, cantrips, rituals... decks like LSV's don't win on pure muscle but on finding his 5 or so cards that actually do something, putting them together, making massive amounts of mana, and letting the broken interactions happen.
The untap/tap theme is extremely good in that cube because the cards are rarely required to stand on their own. The more interaction your cube has, the worse it gets.
I agree - I'm sure it is very much possible to build a cube where Time Vault is the best first pick, but it would require a lot of cards that don't really aid any other archetype in any way at all. Stuff like Kiora's Follower and Tezzeret the Seeker are fine cards in their own right but things like Voltaic Key, not so much. Of course it's an amazing first pick there, because many of the supporting cards are so bad that you can pretty much guarantee that they will wheel. Take the Vault, and all you need is to pick the bits when they show up and take drawing and filtering with every other pick.
I think in an artifact themed cube with a ton of additional interactions on that front would make it really good. But I don't particularly want a very easily assembled insta-win combo in any case. Kiki combo at least doesn't use cards that are really bad outside of the deck. I like that combo package a lot more, as at least there will some more competition for the pieces.
I've watched that video, as well as a few other recent CFB Holiday Cube draft videos. I've played with the idea of trying out Time Vault in my cube, but after watching those videos, I've decided to never include that horrible thing. That card plays even worse than I feared: It is either a dead draw or "BAM! You lost! Do you concede or do wanna play it out over a dozen boring turns?"... Basically, it's the worst kind of variance. And to top it off, it is either super unreliable to draft or I have to put some super narrow cards into my cube? Nope. Not going to include this thing.
Well clearly, how did you expect me to pull this off, haha?
I can just speak from personal experience and tell you that when you're a full-functioning Time Vault deck, unless you're drawing Voltaic Key + nothing else of relevance (or Time Vault + no tutors, card selection, draw7s, enablers etc), you're going to be happy you picked up the pieces.
Well, if we're assuming people are taking the card and drafting around it (which happens very often here) when it's opened 1st pack, then that's 33% of the time right off the bat. In the second pack (66% of the time) Time Vault also gets drafted into the deck that wants it. 33% of the time in the last pack, it's significantly worse (just like Worldknit), but again, speaking from experience, Time Vault gets maindecked 50% of the time with 2 enablers. With 3, it would be above 50% of the time I'm sure.
Well, if Time Vault is being maindecked ~50% of the time, I'd assume the enablers are getting maindecked that often too. Ral Zarek and Tezzeret have uses outside of just Time Vault, so the percentage on them goes up for sure. Voltaic Key is a dud a lot of times (I've never argued otherwise), but I think it's worth it to add a deck to the cube.
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Okay. All I did this for was to experiment with if the deck would come together often enough, and I knew because of my experience at 360 with 2 enablers (and 3), that it certainly would. Using the methods above, I think my conclusions met my hypothesis pretty well
Okay. Well, I have years of playing experience on you with the combo, and I can wholeheartedly say that the combo is good, and the deck itself is rarely better off with something else entirely. The drafts actually do help here with the latter part of this statement.
Are you counting enablers + tutors + draw7s + card selection? You really don't need 4 enablers in any of the above decks I just posted, they all have enough tutors, card draw/selection, and draw7s to get there nearly every single game.
I just took out three cards to put in Time Vault + Key + Tezzeret, I didn't have the goal of anything besides showing viewers how Time Vault would look with those enabler numbers.
First deck:
Also sports: Preordain, Jace the Mind Sculptor, Faithless Looting, Enclave Cryptologist.
In a 35 deck, this stuff is going to be plenty to find you your pieces the vast majority of games. Also have a Cogwork Librarian there just chillin'
Second deck:
Also sports: Dig Through Time, Fact or Fiction, Faithless Looting, Brainstorm, Magma Jet, Snapcaster Mage, Looter Il-Kor, Enclave Cryptologist, Mystical Tutor.
Yeah, that one is getting there too. Three enablers, a draw 7, and a ton of ways to find all that stuff.
Third deck:
Also sports: Dig Through Time, Condescend, Deep Analysis, Booster Tutor, Faithless Looting, Mystical Tutor.
Yeah, third one is getting there too. All these decks would be fine at hitting Time Vault + something else pretty easily in most of its games. I'm speaking out of experience here based on what Time Vault decks I think would be successful vs. Time Vault decks I think would be unsuccessful, and all of these would have high win percentages.
Again, these are just Time Vault decks that I made up in this little experiment. There are lots of decks that don't look like this but would still like Time Vault in them. I was just going more-or-less balls-to-the-walls Time Vault combo enablers to show how good the decks can look. I wanted to make reanimator work as a substrategy for one of these games, but didn't quite get there (although I think that was due to me mispicking cards).
I think the decks speak well-enough for themselves. I'd like to do more later, not sure if I will though.
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How do you know that, lol? I've been drafting cubes with the Vault combo in them since 2008 when Tezz came out to bolster it. I have years of playing experience on you with the combo, and I can wholeheartedly say that the combo needs more enablers before it'll be good.
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Really? If you've dismissed it in the Ral Zarek era, why would you think I assumed you were cubing with it pre-Ral? The deck was worse pre-Ral.
I have never seen Time Vault in any of your lists, and you just said the last time you played it was pre-Ral.
So, assuming you took out Time Vault when Ral Zarek was spoiled (May 2013), that gives you from 2008-early 2013 of experience with Time Vault. I find it really odd that you would take it out right when Ral Zarek got spoiled though (it would encourage you to keep it in even moreso), so I'm guessing you actually weren't playing with it since 2012, possibly even 2011.
I've been cubing Time Vault since I made my first 540 back in 2009 and we've kept it in for the entirety (with a few short exceptions) since then. There is no way that you need 6 enablers in a 360 card cube to support this combo, and I think the decks above prove that point well enough.
So unless you've been secretly drafting with Time Vault every week for years now, I'd be really surprised if you have battled with Time Vault as often as anyone in my playgroup (2009-almost 2015 now).
EDIT: I just checked your set updates (dating back to Worldwake, January 2010) and "Change Log" (dating back to November 2009) and found no control+F of "Time Vault." I did find cuts of Boomerang, Forcefield, Time Warp, etc, so I would have assumed you'd be adding and cutting Time Vault as well. If your updates are accurate, you may have tried it from 2008-2009? We've been cubing Time Vault every (often twice or more on Tues/Fri, and twice or more sometimes weekends and occasionally weekdays) from 2009-now (almost 2015).
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At this point, we simply have to agree to disagree. Your experiences lead you to liking the card, and mine don't. End of story. Your results tell you it's good enough now. My results tell me we need more enablers before it can a regular contributor to winning strategies.
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Based on this, would you generally advise playing Time Vault in a generic blue control deck or some kind of midrange deck without enablers on these types of plays? I'm not arguing for/against it with enablers but genuinely curious as this part piqued my interest as a standalone card.
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The last Time Vault deck I drafted had 2 infinites (Tezzeret and Ral Zarek) and Pestermite. I had 0 tutors (unless you count Tezz), but instead had digging and card draw like Impulse, Fact or Fiction, Thirst for Knowledge, Ancestral Vision, etc etc. I lost 1 game, and it was because I was 1 mana short of playing the Vault and Ral Zarek on the same turn when my opponent had on-board lethal. In this recent example, alongside the dozens of other times I've drafted the deck, there was never an issue of finding the combo. Tutors and card draw in a 40 card deck go a long way to reduce the variance involved. So does aggressively mulliganing. And make no mistake, I don't just draft decks with the Time Vault combo, I draft Time Vault decks. So it's pretty silly for me to envision any of those decks with different cards in place of the combo -- not unless it was a Kiki combo or a Sneak Attack combo or some other 2-piece game-ending interaction. But Inferno Titan or Tamiyo or "something else entirely"? No way would those decks be able to assemble a turn 4 win with consistency like a good Time Vault deck should.
I only play Time Vault in a deck that has at least 1 enabler in it. My playgroup has played Time Vault + Key in probably every single archetype in my cube. I don't think that's correct, haha, but people around here love Vault + Key. Like I said before, I'd actually rather cut it, but the people I play with have just associated it with my cube (I was the first to make a cube around here), so it's just stuck and they've complained when I took it out for a week or two here or there.
Time Vault is not a good standalone card. When it's on the battlefield and it doesn't prompt a concession, it's misplayed well over 50% of the time, but it's definitely not good enough to stand on its own.
Time Vault does have some interesting plays where your opponent passes with a weak board position and counterspells/instants up. It feels so good to just "bank" a turn when your opponent did nothing. But that's definitely not good enough to warrant standing alone, IMO. You're paying a card and a turn, so it's actually win-more at that point since you had a dominant board position to begin with.
The best players in my playgroup will play Time Vault correctly, but it's actually one of the more difficult cards to play since you have to ask every time your opponent passes the turn "Is it better if I just skip my next one?" Sometimes skipping that turn allows your opponent to actually recover better than they otherwise would have (like if they play a Moat -- you would have gotten in some damage the turn you skipped, but now you can't).
It's a tricky card.
Wtwlf123 probably doesn't believe you here, but I do. Sometimes you just get lucky with Time Vault + Enabler, and it's easily the fastest 2-card-kill in any cube (Vault + Key in particular). Tezzeret is just a 1-card-combo because you don't even need to ever see Time Vault when you're playing with Tezz.
Completely agree. Conspiracies (Backup Plan, Double Stroke, Iterative Analysis) go an even longer way to making sure Time Vault players can find their pieces. Black tutors are really the most broken elements of the deck, since they're as close to a Wild Card in cube as you can get.
Yep, agree completely here.
It's not just me though, it's everyone on this thread (save you) that has played with Time Vault for any extended period of time and a decent amount of enablers.
You also haven't played with Time Vault in your cube since adding conspiracies. They help a lot. Even just Power Play is actually an incredibly strong card in Time Vault, since you're going for quick wins here most of the time and ignoring what your opponent is doing in a committed Vault deck.
I think you should test it since now you have access to:
- Ral Zarek
- Backup Plan
- Double Stroke
- Iterative Analysis
- Advantageous Proclamation
- Power Play
- Unexpected Potential
- Brago's Favor
That's a lot of cards that the Time Vault decks love.Adding Tezzeret the Seeker will also give you more critical mass towards another deck archetype that I know you like -- the artifact deck. Having more decks in cube is sweet.
I mean, check out this deck I made by drafting your cube: http://www.cubetutor.com/cubedeck/217384 (Chaos Orb = Time Vault, Super Secret Tech = Voltaic Key). Brago's Favor and Unexpected Potential are on Ral Zarek there. You don't think that deck would do well? I think it would crush.
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It's not just me. There are a ton of cube managers that don't cube with Time Vault because it's too narrow.
They're all just smarter than me and decided to avoid this discussion like the plague.
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Or they may have been convinced by the arguments for Time Vault that they're scrambling out to proxy up a copy and test it soon.
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I love Time Vault, I play the hell out of it in Vintage. There will come a day where its inclusion is easier for me because there's enough additional support for it that it's a "free" slot. I look forward to that. And until then, I'm confidant that excluding it is the right decision for my cube.
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I've had some untap enablers in my cube, can't remember all of them, at some point even Toils of Night and Day was in there. Voltaic Key was never there tho..
These days, my two main enablers are:
Ral Zarek
Tezzeret the Seeker
The next 2 cards I consider Time Vault enablers because of the many bounce effect in cube (mine includes Erratic Portal, Crystal Shard and Waterfront Bouncer for recurring bounce alone)
Pestermite
Zealous Conscripts
Now, none of these cards are bad on their own and will be in my cube regardless of Time Vault so there's no discussion about adding useless card to make Time Vault work, but the problem is that Time Vault is useless on its own. And for that reason I'm finally cutting it from my cube. Lately I haven't seen the combo being played, so either the combo doesn't get drafted together or the player doesn't think he can use the combo consistent enough to include it in the deck. Either way, it's a special card, but I'll finally sell it as I think my cube will be fine without it. It helps that the value of the card has multiplied 6 times since I bought it ;-)
At some point there was a Time Vault deck someone drafted. He played Tezzeret and Ral Zarek. There were a few turn 3 concessions (T2 Time Vault, T3 Ral Zarek with a Mox or Sol Ring), he won the draft. Overall the deck was very solid and consistent with Timetwister and Wheel of Fortune. We'll always have that memory ;-)
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540> 360 Powered CubeHere's one where Paul Cheon from Channelfireball.com drafts a deck that can abuse Time Vault:
http://www.channelfireball.com/videos/channel-cheon-holiday-cube-draft-3/
Our resident Salmo also recently did a draft where he plays against a Time Vault deck in the first round of the tournament:
http://turnonemagic.com/holiday-cube-2014-draft-1/
Here's one from today, LSV actually says that "Time Vault is one of the best cards" in the first minute of drafting.
http://www.channelfireball.com/videos/channel-lsv-holiday-cube-draft-5/
All these decks could obviously be optimized more for Time Vault, but pretty interesting that basically every holiday cube draft I've seen involves Time Vault in one way or another.
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I feel like this year's holiday cube is by far the closest version of the cube I've seen to the cubes I've built.
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Had a Time Vault in my Cube for a while pre-Ral and I was not a fan. Either you didn't get the enablers you needed and wasted an early pick, or you had to draft and play a bunch of narrow suboptimal cards that were unimpressive when you didn't resolve Time Vault, or you had a 2-card instawin combo in a fun casual format.
None of those options appealed to me, so I cut it. With the holiday Cube feedback, I'm even less interested than before even though there are at least 1-2 good cards that can stand alone (I don't believe for a second that KF or Voltaic Key and the like are good standalone cards, for reference.) I don't mind using more narrow cards to support broader/more archetypes, but I won't do it for a 2-card instawin combo. That's not my definition of fun, and it reminds me a lot of trying to draft the mono-black strategy in Cube (the black mana matters/swamps matters type) where you wind up with a bunch of terrible cards if you don't get enough of them.
I'm sure it is plenty powerful, of course, for those who have a strong fun metric = power and combos like that. It's just not fun or flexible enough for me without running terrible cards.
-AA
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For the Magic Online Holiday Cube, the design goal is to create an environment where you can play combo. In order to achieve that, it is perfectly reasonable to include Time Vault and enablers, including arguably narrow ones like Voltaic Key and Kiora's Follower.
For AA, the design goal is to create an environment which he describes as a fun, casual format. There is no room for two card instant-win combos in that environment, including Time Vault would therefore be a very bad idea because it is either just a bad card nobody wants to play or it actively works against the design goal.
Personally, I want to support combo to some extent because I like to enable different strategies (aggro, midrange, control, combo). The sweet spot for me is an environment where drafting dedicated combo is possible, but risky. I hate linear archetypes with a passion (the swamps matter archetype AA mentioned is a good example for that), so most of my combo pieces should be playable on their own in non-combo decks. A prime example is reanimator. I have experimented with other combos as well and I am sure that one day I will be interested in adding the Time Vault combo. Not now, though, because with only Tezzeret the Seeker and Ral Zarek as enablers, chances are you will not see an enabler in the whole draft after picking Time Vault. At least one more enabler is needed for me to consider the addition of Time Vault, I think.
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Completely agreed.
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I've also seen a few videos of the pros drafting cube and talking about how good Time Vault is. I love watching these guys draft, but I don't normally trust their judgment when it comes to cube worthy cards. Good players do not always make for good cube managers.
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The bolded is definitely true, but in this case I agree completely with the "good players", in the sense that once the decision is made to include Time Vault, two "good" enablers and two "bad" enablers (+ the Twin combo package which offers some crossover synergies), it becomes one of the best cards in the Cube to draft and play.
I've done about 15 of the Holiday Cube drafts, and the best draft strategy is Blue and Red, not close. This Cube is defined by "doing broken stuff" (be it Eldrazi Ramp, Reanimator, Artifacts synergies or individually broken cards like Balance and Mind Twist), and having Blue for card drawing/selection and counterspells sort of trumps anything the broken decks are doing. By pairing Red with Blue, you gain access to almost all the broken combo's that are seeded into the Cube, and Time Vault is the best one of those. You really only need one other combo piece, since the rest of your deck is filled with card draw and counterspell, so you'll find the combo eventually.
In addition, U/R offers Twin, Artifacts.dec and Wildfire.dec, or you can splash Black and go Grixis Reanimator. And the "ace in the hole" is the Burn Combo deck. In about half the drafts, Red turns out to be wide open and you can move into the 12-Bolts deck. Aggro decks in general are bad options, since you can't consistently kill the broken decks before they do something terrible to you, but if you get enough burn spells (possibly splashing things like Snapcaster Mage, Power 9 pieces and 1-drop library manipulation), you end up with a deck where all of the cards literally do the same thing, and that kills on turn ~4.5 with frightening consistency.
So anyway, this is a bit of a derail, but Time Vault is amazing in the MTGO Holiday Cube. That doesn't say much on the question of it actually being a good inclusion in the list (or any other), of course, since it is a really "dumb" card that gives out free wins like no other.
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http://www.channelfireball.com/videos/channel-lsv-holiday-cube-draft-6/
He calls it "the best card in the cube" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tCfT5rHX7c&t=1m20s
He takes Time Vault over Sol Ring and Black Lotus later on in the draft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tCfT5rHX7c&t=9m30s
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The untap/tap theme is extremely good in that cube because the cards are rarely required to stand on their own. The more interaction your cube has, the worse it gets.
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I think in an artifact themed cube with a ton of additional interactions on that front would make it really good. But I don't particularly want a very easily assembled insta-win combo in any case. Kiki combo at least doesn't use cards that are really bad outside of the deck. I like that combo package a lot more, as at least there will some more competition for the pieces.
On spoiled card wishlisting and 'should-have-had'-isms:
Uril, the Miststalker RGW -- Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre C -- Vhati il-Dal BG -- Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer RW -- Animar, Soul of Elements URG
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker R -- Maga, Traitor to Mortals B -- Ghave, Guru of Spores BGW -- Sliver Hivelord WUBRG