The seeds of new life take root in the soil of old.
Something underappreciated about Magic is how it generates a seemingly random card for each and every player to fall in love with. Seemingly, of course, because it’s impossible for a stranger to see all of the context that goes into someone declaring “it was made for me!”
Sometimes that love comes from hundreds of games or one particularly hot run in a tournament that they just can’t shake or from the card being the best representation of their favorite character from lore’s past. My buddy Blake would perhaps be the one person on Earth to say “[[Otrimi, the Ever-Playful]].” It was his first Commander, one he grew to enjoy more and more as he realized the Muate mechanic was perhaps Magic’s reddest haired stepchild.
Plenty of people have 100 favorite cards and some know exactly which they would answer when asked the question. It personally has taken me some time to come to the conclusion as to what my own response would be but it’s settled in.
Earlier this year, Ken Baumann asked the question, What Can a Deck Do?
Cascade Cascade
Obviously to anyone who has been playing Magic for some time, the answer is “a whole lot.” If I sit down and think about a deck that has made a profound impact upon me, it’s an extremely silly one. Team Pantheon's Top 8-finishing Season’s Past Control from Pro Tour Shadows Over Innistrad.
The strangeness starts with the fact that it’s a control deck with no blue cards at all - not very conventional, especially within the last 15 years. [[Duress]], [[Transgress the Mind]] and one-of [[Infinite Obliteration]] help search out problematic cards before they hit the battlefield. The deck was built on the idea that [[Languish]] was powerful enough to build an entire deck around and the four copies are backed up by 10 other removal spells with different niche applications. One of those removal spells, [[Ruinous Path]], does excellent triple duty in removing planeswalkers, creatures and having the potential to animate a land into a 4/4 creature if you pay the seven mana Awaken cost… classic Control Win Condition material.
[[Dark Petition]] held it all together as a [[Demonic Tutor]] that almost always had Spell Mastery active, making it easy to follow up with any of the reactive spells or, usually, with the six-mana sorcery that both named the deck & caused it to be brewed in the first place. [[Season’s Past]].
Obviously, with any control deck you need a few things: interaction, win conditions, and card advantage. The black interaction, which has already been covered, is obvious. For win conditions, sure you have Awoken 4/4s but [[Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet]] is not only a life-total stabilizing force but an army in a can when paired with so much creature removal. What about card advantage? As strange as it feels to say in the year of our Lord 2026, [[Read the Bones]] was as good as it got in that standard format, looking at as many as four cards in return for just two life and three mana.
Season’s Past, especially when grabbed by Dark Petition, represents the ultimate card advantage. You get to pick up a card from your graveyard from every mana cost, returning [[Evolving Wilds]], Duress, [[Grasp of Darkness]], Read the Bones, Languish, and Dark Petition, for example, all in one fell swoop. It then puts itself back on the bottom of the library, ready to be grabbed by the tutor yet again as opponents are ground into dust.
Season’s Past Control made headlines when Jon Finkel, who is either the first; second or third best Magic player in history, successfully made the Top 8 before losing 3-1 in his quarterfinals match versus still-relatively-unknown Andrea Mengucci. This deck existed in a specific context, made by a team of incredible pro Magic players to take down exactly one Pro Tour and the meta they guessed would be present there. The extreme anti-creature grinding machine and one-off spells are crafted to beat a range of decks for one weekend only.
My ass did not care. I immediately put the pile together to take on my local Standard FNMs. The allure of this incredible machine casting so many powerful spells and taking control of the battlefield without the help of blue was simply too alluring.
I lost so many games. I lost so many games dude. [[Collected Company]] was the most popular card at my Grand Rapids, MI-based LGS and, despite four-of Languish and all those removal spells, it turns out [[Sylvan Advocate]] is still really, really good to cheat into play off the top of the library. It didn’t help that my name is not Jon Finkel or Reid Duke, another notable who brought the deck that fateful weekend. Who cares, I had four Magic Origins Game Day promo Languishes and you were gonna see them and it ruled.
Realistically, I didn’t play this deck for that long… Maybe a few months at most. But Season’s Past itself grabbed me. I loved how much value was contained in the casting of a single Season’s Past, especially in a deck that was built around specifically maximizing the return. It presented an excellent puzzle for deckbuilding but also a trade-off in game - do you fire it off as quickly as possible, returning one or three cards which you desperately need, when you could wait a turn or two and return four, five, or maybe even six cards? Even at three cards, it’s something akin to three [[Regrowths]] in a trenchcoat (that trades a green mana for a generic).
Every Magic card presents infinite possibilities and trade-offs, even down to the likes of french vanilla commons. It’s rare that a card wears it so easily upon its sleeve. I like a card that’s willing to tell me what it’s all about.
The seeds of new life take root in the soil of old.
Season Past’s flavor text rules. It feels especially relevant given the context of Shadows Over Innistrad’s story of a slow incursion of something strange into the plane - the Eldrazi. New life can be alien or quite natural. Christine Choi’s beautiful artwork features a huge tree, surrounded by saplings, bursting through the stone floor of a dilapidated cathedral. The old crumbles and brings with it new life, new life that will propagate itself over and over again. Regrowth, if you will. Many cards are directly referential to others. This iconic Alpha spell has a whole band of gameplay effects named after it and lives again and again through every green instant or sorcery that returns any card from graveyard to hand. Obviously, Regrowth itself is so strong that we’ve rarely, if ever, seen something as good again. Even Season’s Past - a six drop - comes with restrictions, albeit interesting ones, on what is brought back.
Cascade Cascade
Magic players love to call new spells “strictly better,” or even more commonly “strictly worse.” Usually the correct prognosis is actually “strictly different.” The most iconic effects, such as Regrowth, often have people attempting these distinctions. I wasn’t around, but I can imagine what the reaction for [[Recollect]] in Ravnica: City of Guilds was. Now THAT is a strictly worse effect. I remember my response to the printing of [[Auroral Procession]] (Instant Speed, blue-and-a-green Regrowth) in Tarkir: Dragonstorm last year:
“Really?”
The seeds of new life take root in the soil of old.
I was first introduced to Magic in 2013 by a coworker at Subway. Fast forward to SOI’s release in 2016 and I was regularly doing my best to win at FNMs and PPTQs alike - to poor results obviously. By this time, I was away at college and only able to play more competitive Magic (and 60 card formats, for that matter) during the summers. Returning home to Grand Rapids and picking up with my established, career-having grinder friends in the area felt like entering a time machine to Junior & Senior year of high school. What was available to me when I was at college?
Commander.
2015-ish EDH was a much different beast than it is today. It didn’t scratch the tiny itch in my head looking for power, deck cohesiveness, a gameplan, the need to win. I stumbled upon the small-yet-growing online Competitive Commander (or cEDH) community and the rest was history. My favorite “casual” deck at the time was [[Mormir Vig, Simic Visionary]], which itself grew out of a Kruphix deck that had been a graduation present from the coworker who taught me Magic in the first place. You can tell how casual I was feeling by the fact that I was bringing out Momir Vig.
I crept the deck higher and higher in complexity and power as I got more into the idea of cEDH… while I didn’t have the playgroup around me at college with those power level of decks, I still worked on building out my own attempt at a draw-go control pile that could hang in a four player, strong environment. It leveraged [[Rashmi, Eternities Crafter]] to turn spells into cantrips, helping overcome the inherent card disadvantage of interacting in a multiplayer game of Magic. The deck had exactly one way to win: Season’s Past. Let me explain.
Given that I was trying to make a Simic control deck work in a high-powered, four player Commander pod, deck slots were important to maintain and every card had to “Do something.” As a result, I landed on a not-so-compact win-con that did happen to use almost all cards that had theoretical applications beyond winning the game.
The cards needed to win were:
- [[Isochron Scepter]]
- [[Dramatic Reversal]]
- Nonland permanents that together make 3+ mana when tapped
- … a way to draw the whole deck
- Originally [[Enter the Infinite]], eventually [[Pull from Tomorrow]]
None of those say Season’s Past - stay with me! Once the whole library was in hand, [[Reality Shift]] a creature to manifest the top card of their library. They don’t have a creature? [[Beast Within]] a noncreature permanent! Season’s Past returns these spells to your hand if you already used them - and also will return them to your hand after you use them during this winning loop! It puts itself back onto the bottom of the (empty) library, ready to be drawn again by one of the many cantrips in hand. Don’t worry, Season’s Past gets those back too. Manifest your opponent’s entire libraries away by casting Reality Shift over and over again. Win the game.
I played Rashmi for years - from her release in 2017 until I finally gave up in 2021 following something like a 15 game loss streak. By then, [[Nexus of Fate]] had taken over, Season’s Past left in the dust. It didn’t matter, Season’s Past had gotten me to where I wanted to be. Somehow Known within the Magic: The Gathering space, a member of Playing with Power MTG.
Returning to Ken - a deck can do many things but I sneakily suspect that a card can do even more, at least on an individual level. As metas wax and wane and things come in and out of favor, your favorite card (and the experiences you had with it) remain with you and continue to evolved. You best believe that Season’s Past lives on in my Commander decks, where it’s reasonable to play with still. Maybe I’ll try to brew with it in Value Vintage - but that seems a bit outside of its scope. Six mana for a so-so-except-when-it’s-not Regrowth effect doesn’t do it anymore. It sure did a lot for me though.
Cal Jones (he/him) is not a content creator. He’s a Gamecube collector, DanDan fanatic and occasionally, very occasionally, has a thought to share about Magic: The Gathering. Follow his pursuits on Bluesky.
