Magic Memories: Seasons Past

[Oversoul]

When I think of what to write about for threads like this, I have this recurring thought process that goes something like...

I should write about cards that aren't from the 90's. It's not like I stopped playing Magic in the 90's. There's this card I've been using a lot in EDH and in Canadian Highlander.
I don't want to just write about Highlander formats! 60-card decks with 4-card playsets is the right and proper way to play Magic.
I haven't been playing a lot of 60-card decks lately. What's a card used in those decks that I have fond memories of?
Well, there's this card from the 90's.

At the moment, and really for the past few years, most of my gameplay has been in some kind of "Highlander" format, specifically Commander/EDH and Canadian Highlander. I've been having fun with those formats and I don't feel bad for playing them, but I have this lingering bias that in some way they don't count for as much as games with full playsets of cards allowed would count. I guess what bugs me is that a bit further back in time, I started to notice people who only play EDH and don't touch other formats, and I found the idea off-putting. My focus on Highlander formats has very much been a product of where I play and what my friends play. I never set out to be a Highlander specialist. And yet, that's pretty much been my identity since 2018. Even before that, I was probably focusing on EDH more than I'd been meaning to.

So my New Years Resolution is to stop feeling guilty about that and just write about cards I've used in Highlander formats if I want to. Wait, it's still November and I don't do New Years Resolutions anyway? Oh well. I'm still going to stop feeling guilty about it.

For now, I'm not deliberately steering into matter specific to EDH. If you want to know about my favorite commanders, there's probably plenty I've already written about most of them, and more I could say somewhere else. What I really have in mind are cards that are just broadly useful, but ones that I didn't really appreciate until I started running them in Highlander decks. This encompasses almost all of my favorite cards from the past 5 years or so. I did do a Magic Memories thread for Evolutionary Leap, but almost any card newer than that is something I'd have been more likely to use in Highlander formats than in what I still think of as "normal" Magic. Even the Evolutionary Leap thread had to lean on my usage of the card in a computer game (Magic Duels). And looking back at my notes for Highlander games, there's been no shortage of other cards from around that time period, or even later, that I've really come to appreciate. So now here it is, the Magic Memories thread for the newest card I've started one of these threads on so far.


Seasons Past was released in 2016 and it has proven itself as one of my favorite green cards.

 

[Oversoul]

When Shadows over Innistrad was new, one question that came up was whether this was supposed to be part of a cycle.

WotC likes to do cycles of cards that all follow some pattern, especially when the cycle is one card of each color, like the "Laces" or the "Boons" from the original base set. Sometimes, they seem like they're doing such a cycle, but don't complete it, leaving players wondering where the missing card is. That happened with the "Topdeck Tutor" cards in Mirage and Visions. They made a white one, a blue one, and a green one, then the next set had a black one, leaving players expecting a red one, which WotC had no plans for. There have also been times when they waited a long time to finish a cycle, either because they didn't initially plan to in the first place or because it just took that long. For instance, Darksteel introduced two equipment cards with names fitting the formula "Sword of X and Y." Each one gave an equipped creature +2/+2, protection from two colors, and triggered abilities themed around the colors it granted protection from. They left it at just two cards, out of a possible theoretical cycle of five "enemy" color combinations. Years later when we returned to the plane of Mirrodin, WotC created three more, completing the cycle. Last year, they created two more, using "allied" color combinations, and leaving the full ten-card cycle incomplete, with only seven cards. Since they sometimes come back to a possible "cycle" years later, it's hard to tell whether they might be leaving gaps that they plan to eventually fill, or if they assume those cycles will remain incomplete, but later find themselves going back on that.

Seasons Past seems like the kind of card that might have once been part of a cycle, but with three of the five cards cancelled. Alternatively, WotC only created two cards in the cycle, planning to eventually make the other three. Or perhaps they decided to just stick with the two. I have no idea! What we can tell is that Seasons Past is similar to another card in the set: Ever After.


Notably, Seasons Past occupies a mythic rare slot, which Ever After is a regular rare. WotC is pretty lazy about how they use the mythic rarity slot, now that it's well-established as a tool. Probably both cards started out at the same rarity in early design, but one was shoved into a different rarity to make room for something else in the set. The two are remarkably similar. Both are six-mana sorceries with mana costs of 4 generic and two of a single color. Both have catchy two-word names reminiscent of phrases used in stories. And of course, both cards put themselves on the bottom of their owner's library as part of their resolution. Also, both cards pull other cards out of the caster's graveyard, although that could just be because those mechanics are thematically well-established for black and green. Shadows over Innistrad did employ an abundance of graveyard-based cards and mechanics, so it could have been a deliberate connection.

My initial reaction to both of these cards was to dismiss them as too expensive to be interesting. Six mana is a lot. I was mostly interested in the Legacy format. It's rare for a six-mana sorcery to see play in Legacy, and when it does, it's usually something like Time Spiral or Terminus, where the "six mana" part is technically true, but doesn't tell the whole story. I'm unaware of a single Legacy deck ever using either of these cards. They're just too slow for that format. So in 2016, I dismissed these cards and disregarded them.

 

[Oversoul]

Seasons Past, along with its black sibling from the same set, has seen zero play in Legacy from what I've seen. We are talking about six-mana sorceries, after all. In a format like Legacy, Seasons Past is too inefficient. Even Regrowth doesn't see much play. I think a big part of that is that with how hyperefficient Legacy has become, it's always better to just play another copy of the card than to use Regrowth to get back the copy you already used. That's why Regrowth does see some play in Vintage, even though it's absent from Legacy. Vintage has restricted cards. If you want to cast the same spell twice in Legacy, you just run multiple copies of it. You can't always do that in Vintage.

I written about Regrowth before. I even cited Seasons Past as one of the inferior imitators of the card (and we'll come back to that). In the Memories thread for Regrowth, I went over the history of the card and how it was once restricted because it was an easy way to reuse other restricted cards, Time Walk being the greatest offender there. In fact, I used Seasons Past and Regrowth in my stupid "Sultaitaire" deck and that's a great example of the kind of shenanigans I'm talking about, except for the fact that the deck was bad. I couldn't have improved on it, but I took it apart because I didn't have the time. I used Seasons Past in the only game that this deck won, and it's similar to how I've used the card in EDH. In the right circumstances, Seasons Past is a bomb!

In the case of the Sultaitaire game against the stalled-out Grixis Time Vault deck, I used Mystical Tutor to find Seasons Past, then used Seasons Past to bring back a bunch of cards, including Mystical Tutor (to put Seasons Past back on top of my library) and Time Walk (to get an extra turn and do the whole thing over again. In EDH, I can't use Time Walk, but I do get the Time Warp and similar cards, which work just as well once abundant mana is available. In fact, it's a bit strange that Time Walk is banned in EDH, given how easy it is to abuse Time Warp, Temporal Manipulation, and Capture of Jingzhou. Extra turn spells and tutors have been frequent choices for my Seasons Past castings in EDH. Fetchlands might be even more frequent: there's usually at least one in my graveyard and if there's nothing more important at zero mana, it's convenient to grab a land.

Looking back at the Regrowth thread, there was some interesting discussion with Psarketos about Eternal Witness and its role as a Regrowth substitute. Eternal Witness costs a bit more mana, but looping and recurring creatures and their triggered abilities is generally easier than doing the same with sorceries. Looping is one of the things that made Regrowth dangerous enough to get restricted in 1994, and the recursion of a recursion spell is something WotC is cautious about, although they do sometimes allow it. Looking at my examples of Regrowth knockoffs, almost all of them either target a single card like the original or have a built-in mechanism to prevent recursive recursion. The notable exception to this is Reap, a card that was historically exploited in infinite combos for this reason. I talked about the ReapLace combo in the Regrowth thread, but at the time it didn't occur to me that Seasons Past was a lot closer to a color-agnostic Reap than it was to anything of the other cards I was looking at in that thread. The built-in safeguard on most of these spells is a self-exile, first seen on Recall and later implemented with stuff like Restock Woodland Guidance, and Praetor's Counsel. Seasons Past doesn't exile itself, so you can use it in a loop. It puts itself on the bottom of your library, but getting it back from there turns out to be pretty easy. Isn't that right, Mystical Tutor?

 

[Oversoul]

Mystical Tutor has proven to be especially useful alongside Seasons Past because it allows for recursion of Seasons Past and also because it frees up the two-drop slot for something else. This could be particularly strong when trying to set up extra turns loops, and I've done just that, but I've generally avoided it in in the West Coast Commander League because consecutive extra turns are one of the League's no-no's. Still, I've done a lot of non-consecutive extra turns, with the most extreme example involving a Seasons Past loop with Wilderness Reclamation and Alchemist's Refuge, taking an extra turn between each of my opponents' turns. But that was just the one time, probably. Usually I haven't taken things that far. Using Mystical Tutor to put Seasons Past on top of my library while freeing up the two-drop slot for some other target in my graveyard has been handy though. Some of my favorite two-drops for this have been Cyclonic Rift, Regrowth, and regular old Counterspell.

Despite the role of Mystical Tutor as a mainstay in my Seasons Past loops, both of the times I accidentally went infinite with the card were in black/green decks. Saying that I "accidentally went infinite" might be misleading, and sounds either cheeky or silly. What really happened was that I deliberately build controlling decks, leaving out cards that I might normally run to achieve infinite combos. I thought that these were decks with no capacity for infinite combos. On the first occasion, I spotted the loop, but didn't go for it because I figured it would get countered anyway at the time, only later realizing that the loop could have been truly infinite. On the second occasion, there was already another player with an infinite combo who was going to kill me anyway, and I was just trying to gain a ton of life first for points. So neither one really mattered and I didn't upset anyone else's game with a surprise infinite combo, at least not on those occasions. But both times, I was surprised to see an infinite combo, since I didn't think that one was available in the deck I'd built.

The first accidental infinite combo was in the second game of the WCCL meetup on April 14th of last year. I had build an awkward deck helmed by Savra, Queen of the Golgari and featuring lots of "fight" effects alongside lots of the Deathtouch mechanic. If trying to combine Arena with Archetype of Finality seems kind of redundant in a Savra deck, you're not wrong. Well, I made lots of tokens anyway. And I discovered that with Life from the Loam, Tranquil Thicket, Worm Harvest and Phyrexian Altar I could dredge away my library and then set up a Seasons Past loop with Regrowth or Eternal Witness to infinitely recur Worm Harvest.

You might have thought I'd have learned my lesson at that point, but I mostly just attributed the explosive infinite shenanigans there to Worm Harvest and the weirdness of being able to empty my own library, with the nature of Phyrexian Altar + lots of tokens as another factor. When I built a deck with The Gitrog Monster as commander for the WCCL meetup on January 12th of this year, I deliberately cut most of the cards that I viewed as infinite combo enablers, including Phyrexian Altar. As I noted in my retrospective for that deck, that series of cuts made my maindeck copy of Savra nearly useless, and leaving her in the deck was a major oversight. So I thought I had an explosive deck here, but one that could not make infinite mana. And then I found myself with so many tokens from Titania, Protector of Argoth that I did the math on Gaea's Cradle, realizing that if I tapped my other lands and sacrificed them to Zuran Orb, I'd have even more creatures for Cradle and I'd draw most of my library thanks to The Gitrog Monster. I then set up a loop with Abundance, Gaea's Blessing, Krosan Reclamation, Seasons Past, Crop Rotation, and Splendid Reclamation for infinite mana, infinite life, and infinite 5/3 Elemental tokens. Fool me once, shame on me. Or however that goes. Lesson learned for real that time: Seasons Past goes infinite with a ham sandwich.

 

[Oversoul]

I was curious about the overall statistics for Seasons Past in EDH. Perusing the card on EDHrec, it looks like the results are a mixed bag. Sometimes a few commanders account for the most of the popularity of a card. It looks like Seasons Past is all over the place, appearing in lots of decks with many different commanders, but not appearing in the majority of lists for any given commander. I'm not used to seeing these kinds of numbers, but they're about right for what I'd think a broadly useful card would get on the site. By far the biggest single commander overlap is Tasigur, the Golden Fang. That makes sense, with Tasigur being a graveyard recursion commander. But Seasons Past is only in a minority of Tasigur decks and Tasigur only helms a fraction of the total Seasons Past decks. In fact, it looks like all of the top commanders on the page represent just over a quarter of the Seasons Past decks recorded in the database. So I'm not sure how much those top commanders really matter here. I do notice among them a preponderance of mono-green and a paucity of white mana symbols (just two, in fact: Ravos, the Soultender shows up as a partner and Zacama, Primal Calamity is a major contributor). For some reason, I find those ratios surprising, even though Seasons Past is clearly so diluted across such a diverse pool of decks that the information on its EDHrec page would, in many cases, barely be considered statistically significant.

Maybe it's just markedly different from my own usage? Let's see. At this time, the colors identities of the top commanders for Seasons Past are...
UBG
WUBG
UG
UG
URG
BRG
G
UBG
G
G
URG
G
G
G
URG
WRG
BG
BRG

Going through my West Coast Commander League records, the color identities of my own decks to use this card have been, in chronological order...
BG
UBRG
WUG
RG
UBG
WUBRG
UBG
WUBRG
WG
RG
WUG
RG
WUG
WUBRG
BG
UBG
WG

Well, those are pretty different. But I'm not sure whether there's anything meaningful to be said about the difference.

 

[Oversoul]

With the caveat that the popular applications of the card are sufficiently diverse that some strong and well-liked uses get drowned out by the nature of EDHrec, I do notice that a major difference between my own usage of Seasons Past and that of the general internet hive mind is that I'll use it in just about any two-color combination where green cards are an option, whereas the more general usage favors blue and black. In part, this can be attributed to my Legends gimmick, as the original 55 legendary creatures have a lot of two-color commanders and only use "allied" color pairings, so I'm compelled to play white/green and red/green. Speaking in very broad terms, green is the strongest color in EDH, with blue and black being strong second and third colors in the format. So the statistics for the population in general favor blue/green and black/green, as well as blue/black/green. None of those options exist with Old School commanders. So it shouldn't be too surprising that my own Seasons Past decks have included less popular color combinations.

EDHrec also shows that Seasons Past is popular with certain mono-green commanders. It doesn't surprise me that my own statistics don't show mono-green, because I'm well aware of the fact that mono-green is the only single color option I haven't yet played in the West Coast Commander League. That's a coincidence of the small sample size, in part affected by the 2019 cutoff for my records and the dearth of 2020 decks owing to the pandemic. I have built mono-green EDH decks in the past. I have nothing against mono-green and would probably have played it at some point this year, if I'd kept building a new deck every week the way I was doing before the SARS CoV-2 pandemic shut down the weekly games at my LGS. None of the mono-color decks I've done in the past were done with the intention of filling out that part of the color pie. I did God-Eternal Oketra because I was incentivized to do one of the new commanders from War of the Spark and I pulled her in a booster pack. I liked the idea of playing those white creatures that bounce your own creatures and using that to make tons of zombies, so we were off to the races. I did Teferi, Temporal Archmage because I'd been running into too many high-power combo decks in what was supposed to be a casual leage and I wanted to punish those players by playing something with a high chance of just beating them at their own game. Teferi was a top-tier competitive commander at the time and I saw a way to build it that slowed it down a little bit while having tons of disruption to act as the perfect foil to all the broken combo stuff going around. It backfired because every single one of the players who'd been playing their broken combo decks in the League stayed home that day. I did Godo, Bandit Warlord for the $200 budget event because it seemed like a strong choice for their rules and was the first commander I tested that I found a way to make work the way I wanted within the budget. Then I did Pashalik Mons because I was in a hurry and trying to make a Modern Horizons commander work when I already had a Goblins deck for the Canadian Highlander format and a mono-red EDH I'd played the previous week in a different event. Earlier this year, I did Erebos, the Bleak-Hearted because it was my favorite option of the commander I'd pulled in booster pack from Theros Beyond Death. So every mono-color deck kind of had sensible reasons. There was never an explicit goal of filling those colors. It wasn't until this year that I started looking at statistics for which color combinations I'd done. I'll do mono-green eventually. In fact, Kaysa was one of the commanders I was looking at a couple of months ago when I was trying to build a $100 budget deck, an attempt that fell through due to time constraints and due to my collection being midway through my card-sorting process.

I think the greater propensity for blue and black on the EDHrec page for Seasons Past, compared to my own statistical usage of white and red, the "allied" colors, can be explained pretty easily. Seasons Past is good in any color combination, but blue and black are more popular in EDH overall than white and red, so the blue and/or black options show up just a bit more and drown out the "Top Commander" section. Also, my own statistics are skewed by commanders from Legends, and this has included an over-representation of "allied" color pairings. Somewhat curiously, only two of the four options for white/red/green in Legends have shown up in the West Coast Commander League (making it the least-used tricolor combination for Legends commanders in the League so far), and only one of those has been me (Palladia-Mors) and that deck didn't use Seasons Past. But I did use Seasons Past in decks helmed by Livonya Silone, Sunastian Falconer, and Stanng for red/green. And the card has also appeared in my decks helmed by Sir Shandlar of Eberyn and Lord Magnus for white/green. Of course, there were also Rubinia Soulsinger and Arcades Sabboth for white/blue/green. I didn't actually use Seasons Past when I played Gabriel Angelfire or Lady Caleria, so the representation of the card in white/green could have been even higher in my decks than it has turned out to be. I think this accounts for that difference in the average color identity of a Seasons Past deck among my own numbers vs. those of the community. What I can't explain quite so easily is why five-color commanders not showing up at all, while all three of my five-color decks have been Seasons Past decks. That discrepancy seems notable and I can't really account for it. Best guess: my own five-color decks were built around some silly theme and earning points in the League, while five-color commanders on EDHrec tend to be built top-down around their commanders, and none of those happen to be especially good with Seasons Past.

Anyway, what does interest me is that some of the most popular synergies with Seasons Past are naturally blue and black cards that are naturally, as I've mentioned, obvious choices for their power in Seasons Past loops: stuff like Mystical Tutor, Demonic Tutor, Cyclonic Rift, etc. Oh, and green cards like Regrowth, Kodama's Reach, Harrow, etc. They're great and everyone knows it. But since I've done more than the usual share of running Seasons Past alongside red and alongside white, including a new white/green deck that I put together the day before yesterday for an aborted online West Coast Commander League session, maybe I should share some of my favorite white and red cards to grab with Seasons Past...

 

[Oversoul]

Loops and recursive setups are easy to pull off with Seasons Past, something it shares with cards like Reveillark. If that were all, the card would be an interesting tool to keep in mind. But what takes it beyond that and makes Seasons Past special is that it is often just a good value play on its own, without needing to be part of a certain configuration of cards. As a point of comparison, remember Restock?


It's never been a dominating force or anything, but it's an OK card. Restock costs 1 less than Seasons Past, but it can only grab two cards and it exiles itself in order to do so. Sure, the difference between 3GG and 4GG is significant, and the fact that the card puts itself on the bottom of your library instead of exiling itself wouldn't be enough to make up for that when it's merely a value play instead of a combo setup. But Season's Past almost always grabs more cards than Restock. In fact, I can't remember ever using it to retrieve fewer than three cards. I've gone as high as nine cards, but the average is probably around five. That's not just exceptional, but freakishly good. It's entirely realistic for Seasons Past to act as a highly mana-efficient card advantage spell, something that never usually applies to a Regrowth effect. And having experienced that, I don't really see myself often omitting this card from any green-heavy casual deck I build in the future.