Extra Turns vs Nega-Turns

It’s been a long time since I traded away my Time Stretch. I had it in my intet deck, but never really cared when I cast it since it seemed boring for everyone else. I don’t know that others have the same feeling about extra turns, but they really haven’t been an issue in our playgroup and I routinely pass over stranglehold without dropping it into a deck (the “tutor for a tutor” harassment tends to keep the shuffling under control).

I did recently drop temporal mastery into my Maelstrom Wanderer deck, but its since been taken out. I put it in for being a big juicy 7CMC spell in a deck that’s willing to push the limits of good taste for EDH.  I cast it once, and it was basically a relentless assault. The way I see it if I wanted relentless assault, I’d play relentless assault (or hellkite charger as the case may actually be for Maelstrom Wanderer).

Which is all to say that extra turns haven’t been an issue for me. The way I see it even if one player pops a temporal mastery, I wait 4 turns instead of 3 to get back to dropping my bombs. I’ll groan, but its on the okay side of fair-game. What’s truly hate-worthy is the “nega-turn” provided by cards like Brine Elemental and today’s spotlight card:

Normally I love me my kamigawa cards, but this guy is basically a nega-time-walk, in that one player is about to lose an entire turn. While a time walk in a 4 player game bumps your wait from 3 turns to 4, Yosei bumps your next action sequence from 3 turns to 6... not cool. It’s almost worse than just saying “skip your turn” as it goes after the manabase: aka the ultimate no-no in EDH.

Macaroni or Cheese? If Yosei was tap 5 permanents, those permanents don’t untap, he’d be a totally legit EDH card, even when being recurred. But the Brine Elemental quality of how he is actually worded makes him way too smelly for my liking. I don’t care what someone is doing at the table, nobody deserves to be deprived of their turn in its entirety. The way I see it, if you’re desparate for a monowhite dragon try Elder land Wurm or gump it up with a pearl dragon.