Time Walk

Two mana for an extra turn: no drawback, no condition, no escalating cost, no exile clause, nothing to soften the trade. This is the rate every later extra-turn spell was built to apologize for. Richard Garfield has said the Power Nine were printed because nobody on the original design team believed a trading card game would develop a competitive scene where these effects would be solved; this card is the proof of how badly that assumption aged. Every extra-turn spell since has had to bolt on the restrictions this one lacks. Time Warp held the line at five mana. Temporal Manipulation matched that cost and stayed rare. Nexus of Fate added a shuffle clause to stop loops. Time Stretch went to ten and gave you two turns for the trouble. Karn's Temporal Sundering attached a legendary restriction and a bounce requirement to justify the math. The entire "extra turn" axis in blue is defined by what designers had to add to make the effect printable at a sane power level, and the benchmark they were all measuring against is two mana, sorcery, no text. Restricted in Vintage since the format had a restricted list, banned everywhere else it could be banned, and the reference point by which the phrase "broken card" gets calibrated.