Pattern Recognition #152 - Teferi, Part 1

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

14 May 2020

885 views

Hello everyone! Welcome back to Pattern Recognition! This is TappedOut.net's longest running article series. In it, I aim to bring to you each week a new article about some piece of Magic, be it a card, a mechanic, a deck, or something more fundamental or abstract. I am something of an Old Fogey and part-time Smart Ass, so I sometimes talk out my ass. Feel free to dissent or just plain old correct me! I also have a Patreon if you feel like helping out.

Teferi needs no introduction. He is currently the best character, the best Planeswalker, and best thing Wizards has going for it right now. Enough so that is seems like he will be the "face" of Core 2021 much as Chandra was the face of Core 2020 and Bolas of Core 2019. He is the oldest living Planeswalker still in the game, having appeared first in the game in Mirage and Visions back in 1996/1997.

He's my avatar on Arena. I use a crop of his Stained Glass art from War of the Spark as my icon on boards that allow it. He is da man, and I will brook no arguments about it.

However, it also occurs to me that there are a great many people out there, some of whom are reading this, who have only seen Teferi from his appearances in Dominaria and in War of the Spark and thus have no idea just who he really is, and what he's done that would cause us older players to sigh in love when he shows up.

What? It's Teferi. That's a perfectly valid response!

While Teferi was first introduced to us in Visions and Mirage, his story begins earlier chronologically, but later in the Urza's Block.

Born in 3293 AR (as in, nearly 3300 years after Urza and Mishra were born. The current year is 4562), in Zhalfir, Jamuraa on Dominaria. Of his family, we know nothing. We do know that he was identified as a person of great magical power and was recruited to learn magic and artifice at the Tolarian Academy founded by Urza, Planeswalker.

Teferi... was not a pleasant person to be around. He was a prankster and a trickster, a student who would only learn the things that interested him and didn't care for the ordered life of the Academy, something which drove his teachers, including Urza himself, up the wall. It only makes sense then that the card that represents him in this stage of his life is simple Disruptive Student.

Yeah, I don't know what's going on with that art. I'm just going to chalk it up to poor quality control on Wizard's part in the days of old and move on.

At the Tolarian Academy though, he met and became odd friends with one of the older students, Jhoira of the Ghitu, a girl who took to artifice with a great deal of aplomb, becoming one of Urza's prize students.

The nature of their friendship is vague for the most part, but it seems to have boiled down to the fact that Jhoira didn't take any of Teferi's actions as seriously as others did, and instead worked with him, partly for the challenge and partly for the fact that they just clicked as people who could respect each other.

Even as Jhoira would sabotage Teferi's more stupid pranks, leading Urza to Confiscate his latest 'creation'. And if you don't believe me, the image and lore for Confiscate should tell you everything you need to know about their youthful relationship.

That all changed in 3307 AR, when Phyrexia attacked the Tolarian Academy. They were successful, and Urza used his time machine on Karn both as a test of the machine and to see if time could be changed.

The resulting explosion shattered time across Tolaria, the beginnings of Karn's Temporal Sundering. In this moment, Teferi was trapped in a bubble of slow time while inside an explosion. Urza fought off the Phyrexians, and Jhoira survived in the Academy Ruins. There, she found Teferi's predicament, and did the only thing she could. She threw a wet blanket into the slow-time bubble in order to douse the flames consuming Teferi's clothes. After all, slow time does not mean no time. It took five years from throwing to the fire going out.

After twenty years, Teferi was rescued by Karn and Urza, using a device created by Jhoira that exploited some of the null-time aspects of the waters of Tolaria, something she had noticed when she threw the blanket in years earlier.

Teferi, 14, was out of the bubble and into a world twenty years older. He was cast into despair by this, but Urza took pity on him, and with the help of Jhoira, they helped him regain some of the spark in his life, and while he would regain and never really lose his trickster ways, they were now tempered by the knowledge of what he had been through, a maturation in moments that took decades as be began to realize what was at stake.

With a renewed focus on his studies, Teferi began to learn chronomancy, the magic of Time itself. As he was, at his core, a wizard, this was easier for him than others. He graduated in time (hah!) and at Urza's urging, joined Jhoira at the Thran Mana Rig that would create the Powerstone Shards that would give life to Urza's war machines against Phyrexia. During this time, he was an ally of Urza against Phyrexia, helping him at Serra's Realm, and in finally removing the last Phyrexian influences from the Tolarian Academy.

But in time, he began to drift away from Urza. He returned to his homeland and took up the post of Royal Mage, becoming Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir.

During this time, he ascended into Planeswalkerhood, but the exact place, time, and instigating event are unknown. Personally, I subscribe to the theory that Teferi actually became a Planeswalker during the destruction of Tolaria, the temporal shearing requiring him to ignite his spark in order to survive. The nature of this awakening would explain how he was so much a natural when it came to Chronomancy.

Of course, under this theory, the real reason why Urza went out of his way to rescue Teferi wasn't because of Jhoira, but rather because he saw that Teferi had ascended, and wanted another Planeswalker in his war. That Teferi still grew and aged can be explained that the material nature of Planeswalkers is the result of their mental image of themselves, and as such, if Teferi wasn't aware of his ascension, then he would still think he would be growing and aging like any other person.

But it's just a theory, and there is no firm statement one way or the other just yet. Or possibly ever.

But regardless, at some point, he decided to take a sabbatical or vacation from his position as Royal Archmage. He got permission, and as one of his last acts, he set up five guilds to help run the country in his absence, each representing a colour of Magic. Such as the Civic Guild representing . So, he took off on his vacation and came back about 30 years later.

In his absence, the whole continent had fallen apart. Civil war, invasions from Keld, people disagreeing with how he had set things up now that he wasn't around to defend himself. You know, what typically happens when a manager comes back from a vacation to find everything burning and people wanting Teferi to fix this.

So he did. He found someone that was relatively neutral in all the conflicts, trained her and helped convince everyone to crown her as Queen Yormeba, with the goal of stopping people from going to war with each other an to respect each other's boundaries.

Poor Teferi though, while he succeeded in putting out the fires of his home nation, everyone knew that it was him who was the real power in Zhalfir. Being a Planeswalker kinda does that. So he grew tired of everyone trying to do an end-run around the actual government to try and get him on-side with their politics, he decided to take a few trusted people with him as he retreated to a private island, Teferi's Isle, where he could keep a distant eye on his homeland while leaving them to actually, you know, rule themselves without him watching over them like an irate dad. This would also give him the space and privacy he wanted to run a few of his own experiments regarding the nature of time and how it affected Summons.

He, uh... kinda broke time. Just a little. His initial experiments were poorly formulated, and he kept going at it until he had to be confronted with the truth, that his entire thesis was unstable and wasn't actually better in any way.

Also, he found out about he broke time, so he decided to fix it. It was, after all, his mess. So he stuffed the temporal hole full of his mana, an started to work out the fixing when everything went wrong.

Teferi overloaded the break in time that he had created, and it rebounded, catching the whole isle in its effect, and Teferi's Isle vanished. Or at least, it did from the outside world. For everyone on the Isle, nothing odd had happened at all. But outside, the world noted the vanishing isle, and it attracted three mages to Zhalfir, each with their own agenda. Mangara of Corondor, the man who would succeed where Teferi's chosen Queen would fail and unite the continent, Jolrael, Empress of Beasts, a friend of Teferi who wanted to know where her friend had gone, even as she despise leaving her homeland to do so, and Kaervek the Merciless, a man who brought the continent to war in order to benefit himself.

There's a reason why all three of these characters appear in the time Spiral block, and why two of them are on my short-ish list for Commander decks.

Once Teferi discovered what had happened, he started two projects. The first was to stop the way that Kaervek had begun, rescuing Mangara and turning Jolrael from the former's camp to the latter. At the same time, he was also researching what had happened, and because of that, he couldn't really leave his Isle. Instead, he helped by crafting the Visions of the titular set to help guide people to his ends rather than get involved directly.

He discovered that thanks to his faulty experiments, that he could replicate the magical accident that caused his Isle to vanish for so long. He called this new effect "phasing" and it was described as something akin to skipping a stone over water. A phased object would 'touch' the water, returning to reality for a time before 'skipping' ahead, out of time and unaffected by it or anything affected by time. With practice, he could control how long something phased out and how large an area could be affected, something he would later use to great affect.

I should do an article about Phasing.

Thanks to Teferi's manipulations, the Mirage War came to an end, and Teferi fell into another funk. He had screwed up again and people had paid the price for his actions and non-action. He remained a recluse, not really interacting with the rest of the world, save for attempts by those who knew him to cajole him from his home.

He was to play a part in the aborted Planeswalker's War storyline from the Magic Comics, but that was superseded by the Invasion.

And so we come to the Phyrexian Invasion, the greatest event in the history of Magic. Screw you, Nicol Bolas, you're a chump compared to what happened here.

While I've covered the Invasion from other perspectives before, Teferi's direct participation started a little before, when he intervened at the last minute to protect Jamurra from a Keld invasion, as such things happened. After he acted, he reflected on his actions and drew parallels to how Urza was acting, having an end goal in mind, but not really caring how he got to it.

Teferi, for all of his life, had seen what happened when people stopped caring, and so he resolved to bow out of Urza's coming war, and set about finding an alternate solution for those who didn't see the Urza-Yawgmoth war as something that could be fought in or against.

When the Invasion started, one of Phyrexia's attack points was a Planar Portal over Zhalfir. Investigating the portal, Teferi recognized that they were all connected, so he convinced Urza to help him disrupt the whole system by having the two of them repeatedly Planeswalk through the portals, overloading them in the process. He assured Urza that he had a use for the excess energy being created, and he did.

He took the energy that came from breaking down Phyrexia's portals, and with it, crafted the greatest spell of his life.

You see, he realized that this whole war was a sham. Urza and Phyrexia were becoming more and more alike, and when Urza offered him a position as his second in command of the Nine Titans, Teferi turned him down, forcing Urza to recruit Daria to replace him at the last minute.

Teferi had set up a region that overlapped part of Shiv and Jamuraa, creating Teferi's Moat to help keep the Phyrexians out. Those who sought shelter could flee there. At first, Urza didn't mind that as it meant less distractions for his forces fighting Phyrexia, but after they destabilized the portals, and Teferi drew the energy into his spell did Urza realize what Teferi was doing.

Teferi's Protection fell over what would become the Zhalfirin Void, and he phased out a good portion of two continents and the ocean between them.

To give you perspective, imagine if you will, war in Europe (sorry guys!), and the supreme commander of the defenders there, Urza, just saw one of the few people he actually trusted, take the whole of the Middle East, Asia Minor, the eastern Mediterranean, and North-eastern Africa in a giant circle ... and vanish.

Urza was beyond angry with Teferi, accusing him of being a coward and taking many useful allies and peoples away from the war. Teferi countered that Urza's war would have no end, for Urza hadn't thought about what he was doing to the bystanders, the innocents and the uninvolved. Urza couldn't understand, so engrossed by his own obsession that Teferi had enough of Urza, and phased himself out, leaving the elderly Planeswalker with one less person who could reign him in.

The Mad Karona, False God hallucinated meeting Teferi, thinking him an avatar of , and not of . Of course, Teferi had no knowledge of this, and I hold it as Karona further going crazy as a living Mana Confluence.

Teferi's next actual plot came with Time Spiral. He, along with Jhoira, phased back in three hunre years after the Phyrexian Invasion to review the situation on Dominaria, and to determine if it was now safe to returned the phased out lands and people to reality.

He saw Dominaria was dying. The multitude of apocalypses that had ravaged Dominaria since the day Nicol Bolas first ascended as a Planeswalker at the Talon Gates through Karona's Madness. He saw his own actions at Teferi's Isle and where he ripped a chuck of Dominaria out as rifts to be mended.

After doing his research, he came to a horrific conclusion. Each rift was an infinite maw, and there was only one thing that could fill up an infinite hole.

The infinite power of a Planeswalker's spark.

His first barrier was a newly reborn Nicol Bolas, the dragon having used the temporal rift at the Talon Gates to copy himself forward in time past his death and releasing his spirit from the Meditation Realm. They dueled, but Teferi is not a person who had fought directly in a Planeswalker's Duel fora very long time, which meant that Bolas won. However, over the course of the battle, Teferi was able to convince Bolas of the threat that the Rifts represented, and Bolas didn't kill Teferi, allowing him to heal the Rift over Shiv, returning that part of his phased out lands to reality.

At the cost of his Spark.

Teferi was no longer a Planeswalker, but merely a mortal mage. A multi-century old mage with a specialty in chronomancy and enough tricks up his sleeve to give even an Elder Dragon God pause.

However, another Planeswalker, Jeska, tried to avoid the problems of losing her Spark to heal a rift, and over Teferi's objects, used the unignited spark of Radha, Heir to Keld in conjunction with hers to heal the rest of the Zhalfirian Rift. The tactic worked in preserving Jeska's spark (and I look forward to her Planeswalker card in Commander Legends), but at the expense of burning and severely injuring Radha and her Spark - and more tragically, failing to phase in Zhalfir.

Teferi could only watch in horror as his homeland was forever denied to him, now lacking the power to undo the damage done, knowing that they were trapped with no time, and no rescue.

But he resolved to see The Mending of Dominaria through to the end, and wished the first of the new breed of Planeswalkers, Venser, the Sojourner good luck on his travels. He returned to what remained of his homelands and set about helping to rebuild it.

Sixty years later, in a pair of complete and utterly bullshit retcons, he discovered that Urza had apparently decided to take time out of fighting the Phyrexians to devise a method to safely restore Zhalfir and Shiv should Teferi fail.

Yeah. Point to me when Urza did that and why he would care and I'll believe it happened.

He was joined in this by the new Weatherlight crew, under Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain and the remains of the Gatewatch after their disastrous battle against Bolas on Amonkhet, namely Liliana Vess and Gideon Jura.

And don't get me started on the 'lesson' that Urza thought to teach Teferi. It was out of character for Urza, something that Teferi had tried to teach Urza and was just... ugh....

I miss the days of good story.

The other stupidity is that Jhoira had used the Shivan Mana Rig to somehow Salvage Teferi's Spark and was able to present it to him in the form of a Worn Powerstone.

Congrats, Jhoira! You improvised something out of your ass at the drop of a hat that Yawgmoth couldn't do with millennia of effort and an entire plane at his disposal. You're an artificer that makes Urza look like a drooling moron!

Anyways, she gives it back to Teferi with the option of either using on himself, or not.

He used it, and Teferi, Hero of Dominaria took the Oath of Teferi, recognizing that the call to action was upon him, and this time, he would not falter nor abandon his duties.

Thus, Teferi, along with his old friend Karn, the Great Creator, and fellow Dominarian, Jaya Ballard, went to Ravnica to defend the city-plane from Nicol Boas and his invading army of undead.

So, Teferi, a master of chronomancy, practice at defending places, and a point to make about what should and should not be done decides to hold the line against a pale imitation of the Phyrexian Invasion, he completely nails it. First by turning the entire Emergence Zone into a slow-time bubble, delaying the arrival of the Eternal Armies long enough for the Ravnicans to rally, and then after that line was breached, casting Teferi's Time Twist like it was going out of style to rescue as many innocents and trapped Planeswalkers from the advancing Eternals, as well as simply using a Time Wipe to remove chunks of the army from existence.

Jace himself thinks that Teferi saved more lives from Bolas and his Eternals that day than anyone else, and for once, I agree with Jace. Teferi is just so awesome that even Wizard's poster-boy thinks he's amazing.

He participated in the effort to assassinate Liliana, Dreadhorde General, though he and his allies were stopped by Bolas's direct intervention and by the spirits in The Chain Veil.

He survived the War of the Spark, and in the aftermath, when last we saw him, Teferi, Karn and Ajanai were laying plans to address the Phyrexians on Mirrorden, a sequel hook if ever I saw one.

deep breath

So, that's a rough biography of Teferi. But what is it about him that makes him more than just that collection of words? Why do I maintain that he's a better Planeswalker than Jace?

Well, let me start with the best point. Teferi has Character and Character Development. At the start, he was a hellion, a prankster and a straight up asshole of a teenager. But the destruction of the Tolarian Academy started a change in him. He started to wisen up and focus more, and while he never gave up his deceptive ways, he was tempered by age and experience.

His friendship with Jhoira helped show him other ways of doing things, and even when they drifted apart, the effects they had on each other at the Academy and after had an effect on him. He couldn't forget that there were more than just Planeswalkers out there, because his first real friend wasn't one, a thread of thought that culminated in his rejection of Urza.

Even his attempts at helping rule his homelands showed how he evolved over time. He tried to take a direct hand, being an advisor, but when he found that without his guidance, everything fell apart, he worked even harder to try and set up a system that didn't depend on him. He didn't double-down on trying to control everything - cough Urza cough Bolas cough - he learned to let go his desires for more power and to try and get others to improve themselves.

He took responsibility for his mistakes, small and large. While he was willing to prank and punish, even he learned to recognize when his actions had consequences that spiraled out of his control. From helping resolve the Mirage War to sacrificing his infinite power to save a place that was not his home - but the homeland of Jhoira, he understood that he had to take responsibility for his actions.

Even the Oath of Teferi is nothing idle, it is a recognition that as a Planeswalker, he is in the unique position to help those that would otherwise be without help, those who would have been lost in the shuffle of larger players like himself. He remembers his own arrogance and folly in the same stroke, and resolves to make it right.

Teferi is the best Planeswalker not because of any mechanical effect he may have, but rather because his love of knowledge is not an absolute abstract. He loves knowledge, but he knows that knowledge that isn't used is useless, so he goes out and acts on his knowledge, and on the knowledge of others.

Teferi is the best Planeswalker not only because of the previous note (and because the only real competition, Dovin Baan got killed unceremoniously), but because he represents the best traits of the two colours. He is kind and generous, ready and able to help those who need it with more than just good will and a kind word. He has the experience and practice to help not only directly, but also to arrange things behind the scenes to make sure things stay in a way made for the better, to encourage and enable people to improve themselves and others around them as well. He does not constrain, he frees.

Teferi is the best Planeswalker, hands down. He is more than just the Grumpy Old Man of the Gatewatch, he is the one who can guide all these new people into a wider multiverse, speaking with centuries of experience, sharing his victories and his failures, giving and learning lessons all the while.

And I look forward to seeing more of him in the future.

So, join me next week when I start to break down how he plays mechanically, and why whenever Teferi makes his presence known, the usual reaction from the opponent is Oh No.

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!