Exclusive Time Spiral Remastered Preview! Exclusive Time Spiral Remastered Preview!
While we've gotten a lot of sweet sets and cards lately and it seems like a bunch more are on the horizon, one of the sets I've been most excited about on the 2021 Magic calendar is Time Spiral Remastered. While having more reprints is always a good thing, the main reason I've been counting down the days until Time Spiral Remastered spoiler season is the old-border reprints. I'm a huge, huge old-border fan, to the point where I often don't play a version of a card with art that I like just because it's in the new border. I can't even really explain why I'm such a big fan of old borders. I just like them.
Well, today, thanks to the awesomeness of Wizards, I've got a couple of sweet Time Spiral Remastered preview cards to show off for you, including the most important old-border reprint in the set...
That's right! Panharmonicon is back and looking better than ever with its old-school brown border! If you've followed me for any amount of time, you'll know there are only a few things in Magic that I love more than old-border cards, and Panharmonicon is high on the list. While the artifact has never really been a tournament staple (outside of a very brief few weeks in Standard before Reflector Mage was banned), it's a really fun, durdly, value-centric card that also has the potential to enable weird combos. Basically, it's everything about Magic I love all wrapped up into a four-mana artifact.
Currently, the most common home for Panharmonicon is on Commander tables. While it isn't quite an ultra-staple like Sol Ring is, it is one of the 30-ish most played colorless cards in the format, showing up in all kinds of decks, including enters-the-battlefield focused decks. If you're playing a Commander like Roon of the Hidden Realm, Yarok, the Desecrated, or Gonti, Lord of Luxury, Panharmonicon will almost always not just find its way into your deck but be absurdly powerful in your deck.
In other formats, Panharmonicon is typically too slow for top-tier decks. Taking off Turn 4 in a format like Modern is tough. There's a good chance you'll just die before you untap. However, if you do untap with a Panharmonicon on the battlefield, you're going to have a really good turn. Its explosive potential has made Panharmonicon one of the cards I've built decks around the most. In fact, my MTGGoldfish deck page shows 107 decks with Panharmonicon, and while some of those decks are for Commander, most are for other formats. Since previewing reprints is a bit strange (mostly because people already know the card, where it goes, and what it does), instead of trying to re-teach you the joys of Panharmonicon in text form, I figured the best way to get a look at what the artifact can do in non-Commander formats is to show off a few of my favorite Panharmonicon decks from over the years!
The Beginning
When Kaladesh was released back in the fall of 2016, Panharmonicon was the very first Against the Odds card we played. The deck was a pretty straightforward five-color Panharmonicon build. No combos, just tons of value. The deck was surprisingly successful, going 4-1 in five matches, which kick-started the Panharmonicon craze that would follow.
Panharmonicon Combo
While a lot of early Panharmonicon builds mostly focused on using the artifact for value, eventually, we realized it was possible to use Panharmonicon as a combo piece. Bantharmonicon was the first infinite-combo Panharmonicon deck we played. The idea was to find any two of Felidar Guardian and Wispweaver Angel alongside Panharmonicon. This would allow us to blink two things whenever Felidar Guardian entered the battlefield, which meant one blink trigger could target the other Felidar Guardian (or Wispweaver Angel) to give us two more blink triggers, while the other could target something like Cloudblazer to let us draw our entire deck. We could then start blinking lands to untap them to make infinite mana and eventually win with infinite damage from our one copy of Walking Ballista!
Non-Standard Panharmonicon
The downside of having an all-time-favorite Standard card is that Standard rotates, and you eventually have to stop playing that card in the format. Thankfully, we figured out that we could simply start playing Panharmonicon in other formats and keep the fun going! Pan-Meria combined one of my favorite Modern budget decks (Mono-White Emeria) with one of my favorite cards (Panharmonicon) along with the same Felidar Guardian–based infinite combo loops we just talked about in Standard, minus Walking Ballista (which quickly became too pricey for budget decks) as the win condition. While the deck wasn't especially fast, it did generate an absurd amount of value in the late game, with Emeria, the Sky Ruin to reanimate creatures with enters-the-battlefield triggers and Panharmonicon to double up those triggers.
Dagger Burn
Perhaps the wackiest Panharmonicon deck is the infamous Dagger Burn, which we have played in Standard, Historic, Pioneer, and Modern over the years. The deck is by far the most unique Panharmonicon deck. Rather than using Panharmonicon to power up our enters-the-battlefield triggers, in Dagger Burn, Panharmonicon combines with Dowsing Dagger and creatures like Hunted Phantasm and Clackbridge Troll to give our opponent a bunch of tokens, hopefully draining our opponent out of the game with Trespasser's Curse or Rampaging Ferocidon (which also double trigger thanks to Panharmonicon)!
The Present
While it might seem like Panharmonicon is a cool card that's past its prime, that simply isn't true. In fact, the last Panharmonicon deck we played was just a couple of months ago in "Scarecrow"amonicon, a Modern deck looking to turn all of our creatures into "Scarecrows" with Arcane Adaptation (this was the bad old days before Maskwood Nexus existed), stick a Panharmonicon and a Reaper King, play a few random creatures, and hopefully blow up all of our opponent's permanents for a flawless victory!
Anyway, that's a brief history of Panharmonicon. If you want to see all of the Panharmonicon decks I've built and played over the years, you'll find them here. Oh yeah, in all of my excitement over Panharmonicon, I almost forgot to talk about our other preview: Vesuva is being reprinted in Time Spiral Remastered too!
While Vesuva isn't quite a staple in any format, it is a really solid reprint, considering it's fairly pricey. Its primary home is in Commander decks, where you can use it to copy any land on the battlefield, which offers a way to snag a powerful utility land from an opponent like Gaea's Cradle or Cabal Coffers. At worst, you can play it and copy a basic land, which isn't exciting, but it's often worth it, considering the only real downside is that the land comes into play tapped, while it has the potential upside of being a copy of the best land in play. In fact, there's a pretty good argument that Vesuva should see more play in Commander, and maybe it will, now that people will be opening up sweet new Time Spiral Remastered copies, which hopefully should make the card more accessible.
Outside of Commander, Vesuva sees the fringiest of play in Legacy and Modern, occasionally being a one-of tutor target in decks with Primeval Titan in Modern, while in Legacy, its primary home is the 12-Post archetype, where Vesuva is basically just another copy of Cloudpost or, at worst, Glimmerpost. It also is the kind of card that should keep getting better as more cards are printed, especially now that Wizards shies away from printing legendary lands. It seems possible that, at some point in the future, the right land will come along to make Vesuva a devastating combo piece, which could suddenly turn it into a Modern or Legacy staple.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today! Thanks again to Wizards for hooking us up with not one but two awesome Time Spiral Remastered spoilers! As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
