Echo of Eons – Modern Horizons MTG Review

David
Fanany
Player
since
1995

Way back in 2003, I remember a big fight on another website about Mirrodin‘s Temporal Cascade. One side of the argument held that if you were going to make a “nine mana Timetwister”, you may as well just not make one at all. Echo of Eons is quite different – for all intents and purposes, it’s pretty much just Timetwister. It’s so easy to get a card into your graveyard that its flashback cost may as well be its regular cost for a lot of decks. The only downside with that is that it makes your opponent’s Rest in Peace into a white version of Thoughtseize, but there are ways around that. Besides, you can always cast it for its normal cost if the game goes long and they manage to keep their hoser enchantment in play.

It also has art by the mind-blowingly talented Terese Nielsen, which is something that Timetwister will most likely never have!

Constructed: 3/5
Casual: 4/5
Limited: 3/5
Multiplayer: 3/5
EDH/Commander: 3/5

Well, this is interesting. We’ve gotten a lot of variants on Timetwister over the years, but most of them tend to try to avoid the ability to abuse them, usually through being expensive and through self-exile after resolution. Day’s Undoing is the closest we’ve had to a full-reprint of Timetwister, but that annoying “end the turn if it’s your turn” clause makes it harder to abuse.

Echo of Eons comes close to being Timetwister 2.0; if nothing else, it’s promising! Unlike most Timetwister variants, it doesn’t self-exile on cast…it instead sits in your graveyard, waiting for the chance to cast again for half the mana. This makes for an interesting set of considerations: you can try to cheat Echo of Eons into your graveyard to cast it on the cheap, you can use it more “fairly”, or you can try some manner of shenanigans to get it to work.

I’m still not completely sure on if Echo of Eons is good enough for Modern play, but it’s pretty close to being there, since 3 mana is a very good place to be for this effect. There will be some way it gets abused (like the original Timetwister!); I don’t completely know how, but my gut tells me that there’s going to be something that breaks this wide open.

Constructed: 3.5
Casual: 3.75
Limited: 3.5
Multiplayer: 3
Commander: 4