Spoiler Highlight: Temporal Intervention on Pauper

The Edge of Eternities season has barely begun, and one of the cards revealed during the lore has already taken over the Pauper community, with several speculations about its potential: Temporal Intervention.

The new black discard introduces the Void mechanic, a new version of Revolt that only counts nonland permanents but also counts opponent's permanents, meaning that it can, for example, be used with a one-mana removal to extract an opponent's resource or used with Dispute spells, Bounce and Sacrifice effects for the same purpose, where it virtually becomes an improved Thoughtseize.

However, there is another side to usability: Temporal Intervention requires other cards to work, is unlikely to be a first-turn effect, and for its normal cost, it is worse than Pilfer or Distress - two cards that haven't seen much play in Pauper. So how relevant can the new spell be to the format?

Consider the last time you played a black deck that ran targeted discards in the maindeck. Presumably, the card you chose was Duress due to its mix of versatility and low cost. Think about it: how many times have you wanted a Pilfer instead of a Duress?

And on how many of those occasions did paying an extra mana seem like a necessary cost to deal with a specific threat that Duress doesn't take care of? With reatures. Even in lists that can make good use of the card, the opponent's decks need to have a significant amount of creatures to justify the inclusion of Temporal Intervention, and it can be argued, therefore, that Pauper already has many creatures in its decks and, therefore, it is worth using the new card whenever necessary.

Back to Thoughtseize. In 2013, Reid Duke published an article in which he explained the many and complex nuances of Magic's most famous discard spell: when it was good to use it, when we don't need it on the first turn, in which games it matters and in which it is an easy side-out, and a dozen other essential lessons about resource trading. Duke was called the Midrange King for a reason.

One of these lessons, essential to understanding the usability of Temporal Intervention in Pauper, has to do with redundancy. Duke argues that the more redundant a deck's pieces are, the less important Thoughtseize becomes — a list full of Goblin Guides and 2/2 creatures for one mana, for example, loses very little by taking one of them out of hand when most other cards do the same, and this is one of the key problems with Pauper's creature archetypes.

Many pieces from creature-based archetypes in Pauper are redundant. This doesn't invalidate the card, but it does mean we need a scenario where the cards it hits but Duress doesn't are relevant enough. If we were to list the main targets in the most played archetypes, we would basically be talking about:

Among these, the creatures from the Gruul package are probably the most important because they generate too much value if they enter, technically invalidating removal, and Duress does very little against this strategy.

However, in games against Wildfire, for example, Temporal Intervention stands out considerably if we only pay one mana to remove a key piece, and it is worth noting that the new card removes any non-land, including anything Duress hits.

Temporal Intervention therefore has a place in Pauper but requires some specific conditions and/or combinations to work in the best way:

It requires a Metagame where archetypes in which paying to remove a threat from hand is valid, or where the archetypes that want it can succeed. Games include Jund Wildfire, Gruul Ramp, Affinity to some extent, perhaps Faeries.

Your deck needs to be consistent in triggering Void in some way. This can be done with sacrifice effects like Carrion Feeder or Blood, Map or Treasure tokens, or with cheap removals that we use on the opponent's creatures, or with Bounce/Flicker effects. Fortunately, Pauper is full of these.

Which Pauper decks want Temporal Intervention

The first and most obvious of the possible decks for the new discard are the black Midranges with ease of triggering Void.

The Black Gardens or other lists with Pactdoll Terror are a great example: between Blood tokens, Crypt Rats, Nihil Spellbomb, Eviscerator's Insight, there are enough ways to reduce Temporal Intervention's cost without depending on the opponent, while the list's own removals also help in this case.

One of the problems is doing it early: without Snuff Out, it's much harder to trigger the card on the second turn, and from the third onwards, there will be situations where a Pilfer would be preferable because we would resolve the situation at the right time — if my opponent started with an Arbor Elf for Utopia Sprawl, it's almost certain that they will have the payoff on the next turn.

Jund Wildfire also triggers the new card easily on its own thanks to Krark-Clan Shaman, Makeshift Munitions and Fanatical Offering, not to mention the interactions with Lembas and Nihil Spellbomb, the tokens of Writhing Chrysalis and the board interactions.

There are situations where Tron lists, whether with Pactdoll or Myr Retriever, may want the card as additional protection and/or disruption in interactive matchups, and they also trigger Void easily on their own, but not so much if they depend on the opponent.

Orzhov or Mardu lists with Glint Hawk and Kor Skyfisher also use the card quite easily, but with the problem of having relatively few slots to dedicate to it and, perhaps, not as much motivation to do so in the current Metagame outside Writhing Chrysalis.

It would require some compromises or opening up space on some fronts to use the card effectively, but the ability to return an artifact with Glint Hawk on turn two followed by Temporal Intervention makes it one of the most effective mana-generating ways to use the new card, as long as the lands enter in the right sequencing.

Wrapping Up

Temporal Intervention is the closest Pauper has ever had to Thoughtseize with a little twist of Fatal Push. There are plenty of ways to use the card and reasons to do so, but unlike Duress, it doesn't feel like an automatic inclusion in any black deck — the two aren't mutually exclusive in the right Metagame, they can even complement each other, but Duress is more independent in a broader scope.

It could be a potential new staple, but right now it doesn't sound like the kind of card that will entirely change the Metagame. It's a nice addition, a solid answer in specific scenarios, but far from breaking the format.

Thanks for reading!