Time travel is one those topics and themes I really enjoy.
Okay, it actually can be very frustrating, because rules often seem arbitrarily used by the authors in a singular story and some of those rules seem just silly. Also, the authors may not consider all implications, they may contradict themselves, or introduce unresolved paradoxes which then they hand wave away, etc. etc. The very idea of time travel can lead to conceptual problems as well (from linguistic to existential) - though of course some are resolvable and it's often not the point of the story anyway.

Sometimes a travel in time is just a literary device used to tell us something about the human condition, from personal relationships to contrasting perceptions of the world in different eras or even showcasing possible dangers or blessings of adopting certain political ideologies - as imagined by the authors anyway.
On a personal level time travel stories can motivate the audience to make the right choices the first time around, warn us about the consequences of our actions, rubbing in our faces the fact that we can't go back.

Be it as it may, the question: "What is time, actually?" also seems very fascinating to us. Its nature is one of the grandest and deepest philosophical and scientific mysteries at the core of our perception of reality (some would correct me - allowing for that perception in the first place). And so, many stories, movies, tv shows follow that curiosity and are focused on creating a possibly coherent model of time (and travelling in it, if needed) equally much to the stories of the protagonists themselves, who then have to deal with the implications of their worlds.


Magic the Gathering had its share of time travel and time manipulation stories and ideas.
There was Teferi's time-skipping phasing magic that 'removed things from existence' for some time, until they returned. Well, usually they did...
There were the bubbles of fast and slow time-flow on Tolaria.
The novel Time Streams had the fist genuine time travel, I believe.
Then there was also Future Sight, where Karn time-travelled once again.

And then there was the Test of Metal novel that... changed things.

I'm also vaguely aware of Sarkhan Vol's time travel (I didn't read those stories yet, but got the general gist of the idea behind it spoiled - he travelled into the past to save Ugin, then he returned to the present and things have changed - including him not having had been born).

I have a few questions:
1. As I have not been paying attention to Magic for some time now, were there any other time travel stories, or even cards and flavor texts suggesting time travel events (time-skipping and other manipulations would also be appreciated)?
2. What may be the general issues with any of the time travel events depicted in the sources (separately)? I remember an admission by Teferi that time paradoxes can exist and cause problems, but it wasn't explained what they were IIRC.
3. Has anyone to your knowledge (or have you) attempted to resolve the issues Test of Metal brought? And possibly also Sarkhan's story? Other sources? How in/compatible are these different time travel events?
4. Can they be forced somehow into being compatible under one model of time without going for "it was just a dream" type of lazy and unsatisfactory explanations?

There is a ton of minor things if you include seeing the future. Teferi was in the Dominaria story (and maybe the War of the Spark story) doing minor time magic. I don't know if he actually traveled, I think he just sped up/slowed down things. Teferi's Time Twist might involve a short jump into the future. There was a stupid line about making someone disappear by making them "no longer have ever existed" but I can't find it now.

Thanks.
And right - scrying could be in some instances viewed as taking information from the future.
Although it's unclear 'when' that information is coming from, unless we're explicitly told by someone we could trust on this. It could be the present extrapolated...

That brings us to prophecies. Were there ever definite instances of prophecies that came true and weren't helped to come to pass by some interested parties, planeswalkers or otherwise?

With enough mama everything is possible.

- Doug Beyer

Um. That's a comment on what exactly? Making time-travel events compatible? Drawing information from the future, when future may not exist?

(I also hope that however you used this quote, it was with a sarcastic premise
I mean, it's just a lazy kind of explanation that doesn't really explain anything. And I'm sure even Doug Beyer views Magic's reality as having some fundamental rules, even if they are not all clear now.)

It was on his tumblr somewhere.

Well, I don't doubt that.
Still, you didn't just cite him here randomly?

Either way, if someone says that everything is possible, I will maintain that the word 'possible' needs to be specified.
If it's literally anything, then we end up with a horribly solipsist reality.
Otherwise the possibilities are limited by some underlying ontology, even if it's not fully understood. In other words - we tend to expect things to make sense at some level of reality.




So am I to understand that no other time travel events to the past have been presented?
(Time Streams, Future Sight, Test of Metal, whatever sources describe Sarkhan's story, which I guess would be all the stories accompanying the Tarkir sets?)

I guess the card Time Reversal might suggest travelling back in time.
Alternatively, it could just be about reversing events in local space, while presumably time itself still moves forward. Something like:

[Direction of global time -> ]
S| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
P| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
A| 1 2 3 2 1' B C D E
C| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
E| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

- where the numbers from 1 to 9 would be the expected events if unaffected by time reversal.

I like the theory that Squirle briefly mentioned on his blog, that the explosion that occurred when Karn travelled back in time caused a sort of safe-zone in history around itself, allowing Sarkhan to travel back and save Ugin despite previous assertions that living creatures can't survive time travel (which I think is from Time Streams? I have not read it yet, am doing it next after the Ice Age saga).

I haven't read the Tarkir stories yet, but that's an interesting take. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
I don't see why Karn would create a safezone though - unknowingly? Previous time-tarvel events didn't seem to do that before.
If knowingly, for what reason?
[edit: Oh, wait. An explosion? So it's the time travel event in Time Streams! I rushed reading your post, sorry. I guess it would work.]

When I heard about the Tarkir time travel event for the first time I was going in a different direction (and mind you, I have no idea if it works with the narrative of the stories):
It was Ugin who prepared a contingency plan and as he was dying[?], he created whatever that was that he created (or maybe he chose that place to fight Bolas intentionally with a pre-existing set up) - some sort of time travelling magic with an anchor in the moment of activation that extended itself into the future with coming present moments.
Presumably Ugin had perfectly good reasons. To survive and eventually stop Bolas. (Karn seems very much out of place to me here, little that I know, as the reason for why all this was possible.)

Wondering about this, I also noticed that there's a difference between what Urza wanted to accomplish and what Ugin wanted to accomplish. IIRC, Urza wanted to travel back in time to since you haven't read it yet, a SPOILER: stop Phyrexians from ever existing in the first place. /spoiler

Ugin presumably wanted to affect someone in his future (I wonder how he did it - why was Sarkhan affected, specifically? Don't answer I'll read the stories soon) who would be able to return just to that moment in his present, as he was dying or about to die. I reminded myself of s-f stories in which backward time travel is only possible up to the moment of setting up the time-machine and its infrastructure.

That seems to give us the necessary pieces to solve the puzzle, enough wiggle room to accommodate different types of time travel as a possibility without necessarily losing the coherency of the narrative and the past information from the canon (I'm sure you'll tell me if I'm wrong though). So, there's the:
Ugin's approach: set up the infrastructure first (whatever magic he used), which will decrease temporal pressure from that point onwards (and only in the space-time volume where that infrastructure exists) - enough so that mortal beings, or at least planeswalkers would be able to survive it; but that infrastructure allows to go back only up to the moment of its creation.
Urza's approach (later also Karn's): much more ambitious - go against the current of time, without a set up of any initial infrastructure that would ease the time travel.

This also allows us to sort of excuse earlier stories and answer why Urza wouldn't choose to pursue this potentially easier rout of research and time travel that Ugin chose, despite being one of the most knowledgable beings and a very powerful planeswalker: even if he considered it, it simply wasn't enough for his end goal.

Seems to me like an elegant way out of this mess. Although details of the Tarkir stories may yet prove me wrong. (Test of Metal trouble is waaaay deeper, but I'm experimenting with some ways to make it all fit).

Thoughts?

I think we should just assume that pretty much everything in Test of Metal is no longer canon. Aside from that, Ugin building a continuous time tunnel from the present to the future as time progresses along, is an interesting idea which I like. But I don't know enough about the intricacies of the older stories involving Urza and time stuff to say if would actually work.

I think the strength of this Ugin's Time Tunnel Hypothesis lies in that it works around of what Urza did and his intentions without falsifying/retconning them. But the details will have to be checked and re-checked for sure.

And yeah, I quite didn't like what Test of Metal brought upon the Multiverse, to put it mildly , yet some part of me doesn't want to let it go - of everything that happened. It's not like other blunders in MTG publishing history were just outright removed wholly. Of course, the only way out of ToM's retcons is to somehow retcon them right back, or reinterpret some of the novel's parts, but in a way that would preserve the internal logic, beliefs of the characters, etc.

I'm not sure it's possible in the details. But I'm making up some models of time that in general terms could solve it. However, my memory of the book is already foggy and the details of my models proliferate so much in so many directions I'm gonna have to postpone this, until I go back and do some preliminary work.

I'll try to extract all relevant information to time manipulation, especially time travel, from the books I have. I may post all the quotes here first too. Then I'll get back to the attempts to stitch them all together.

On a side note, I was bouncing around the various Internet resources to see what stories I've missed since I stopped paying attention to Magic and found this mtgsalvation page, with a link to this comprehensive novel list. No Test of Metal to be found there!

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In the meantime, I've also found a few cards that may be troublesome to interpret.
Knight of Old Benalia and Thran Temporal Gateway.
Portals from the past...

First of all - I'm shocked to learn that the Thran dabbled in time manipulation. That's new, isn't it?
Anyone can shed light on this? Do any stories or flavor related articles accompany this card? Or is it just it?

Anyway, these cards reminded me of one time-manipulation story I completely forgot about - The Return of the Empress!
Portal to the future...
Which made me realise I've never seriously considered how they work in terms of time-mechanics provided by the Time Streams and Future Sight novels (not that I remember anyway). These are not phasing spells, but genuine portals... So if someone creates a portal to the future, does that mean the future exists physically after all, or is it only through illusory perception of the traveller that no time seemed to pass when they crossed the portal? The second idea is more coherent with TS&FS.

But more importantly, could someone cross these portals in the other direction when they're opened?
To preserve the TS&FS logic, they must be one-directional and travelling through them to the past should be impossible, maybe unless by certain time-probes made of silver? Or unless they'd be based on a similar recipe to that proposed by me for Ugin's magic. Maybe then they'd allow for bi-directionality. Although it doesn't seem to be their stated purpose, so I'd rather have them work only from the past to the future.

And then I've also found Temporal Spring.
"One splash of the spring’s water knocks you clear into last week."

I kinda want to take that flavor text as an idiomatic expression of the immense force of the attack, even though the flavor implies some temporal energies are used in the spell. Either this, or it could be the time reversal case, as explained in an earlier post.