Hello everybody and welcome back to another Fan Community Spotlight. Our break between this installment and the previous one has been 4 weeks, which given the month of February, was exactly one month ago. The series in general has been very slow this year, which is somewhat bizarre given how full of life it was in 2022 and how much a drastic drop it made in such a short amount of time.

This week I’m going to bring one of my own projects to the table - my Time Traveler class. I normally wouldn’t do this, but given the huge gap in installments, I want to put something up here, and with the new Core set imminent, it gives me an opportunity to talk about the class in the area of how much I’ve accomplished over the last Standard year. To give some perspective as to when I started making the class, the newest expansion at the time was Kobolds & Catacombs, and to this day, I am still actively updating it.

This class was actually covered on the series an extremely long time ago by ShadowsOfSense, because interviewing myself would be a little weird. With how long it’s been though, I think giving it a second appearance in the spotlight is justifiable.

The Time Traveler

As a Time Traveler, your base hero is Thomas Temporison. Through his appearance as a sharply-dressed gentleman, he is a master of temporal magic.

Your base Hero Power is Glimpse, which lets the player look at the top 3 cards of their deck and put them back on top in any order. Upgraded, it becomes Foresight which gives you an extra card to look at it. Though the upgrade might seem minimal at first glance, there’s a whole lot of plays that are opened up with just a single extra card thrown into the equation.

Being able to reorganize your deck order is extremely useful just in general, but in the case of this class, it actually plays perfectly well into another aspect of the class which is its keyword, Quick-Time.

Cards with Quick-Time have a bonus effect that activates if you play the card on the same turn that it enters your hand, whether that be through drawing it or generating it. As long as it’s put there in some way, you’re good to go. Quick-Time might be a bit frustrating or awkward to use in other classes, but with Time Traveler’s strengths, they have the ways to make it work.

Now to put myself into the spotlight.

What's been going on in the class since the last interview? How are the new sets like?

Year of the Hydra was definitely a time for the class where I wanted to try some new things. This is something I cover a bit more of in the next questions, but from the start of the year, I wanted to try to implement a synergy for Future Sight. Future Sight was one of the first cards I ever made for the class back in 2016 and it has been accessible for the class in Standard at every point since.

This had initially given me the idea to make a synergy for it in the first place. In addition to it being in the Core set as a whole, I also brought Clairvoyance of Darkness over. She was originally from The Witchwood as a 2/2 and the effect was a Deathrattle if that gives you any perspective on changing power levels. To go along with this is an entirely new card (and the only one in the entire Core set of this year), Convoked Riftspawn which is a pretty powerful AoE for 3 mana, but it makes sense since you need to use one specific card for it.

The idea of this synergy I also expanded in Voyage of the Sunken City with Wave of Mysticism to generate one, and Abyssal Gazer as a specific payoff card for it. Since Future Sight is itself an Arcane spell, it also meant that it worked with Herald of Arcane. This was mostly the easy part of the year. I tend to always have a few potential card designs in my head at any given point and wait for the perfect time to implement them, and this year was a case of going down that list.

Did these new sets present any challenges for Time Traveler? Did it allow you to cover some new ground?

There were definitely some points where the task of designing for the class was challenging. A lot of that was mostly in the artwork department, and mechanics like Infuse do not help with that. Sometimes I wasn’t exactly too sure what I wanted to do for the class for a given set until I tried to jump in with some ideas. Each of the sets however gave me an opportunity to expand the class in new directions.

When I got to Murder at Castle Nathria, I noticed that I didn’t really have any cards that made use of the spell school mechanic despite the fact that it had existed for over a year now. Something I wanted to do for quite a while at this point was get into more Shadow magic for Time Traveler. They’ve always dabbled in it a little bit, but they’ve never gone full Shadow, tending to stick to Nature or Arcane as their spell schools of choice.

Spell-menagerie archetypes are a cool idea, and Blizzard tried one for Shaman with Fire, Frost, and Nature. This eventually formed the basis of a Nature, Arcane, and Shadow synergy which is mainly represented by Trinket Collector, Jewel Enchanter, Tellni’s Satchel, and Two-Timing Tellni. One of the really convenient parts of archetypes based on minion or spell types is how elegantly and easy they are to support as you can basically make any card you want and give it the appropriate minion or spell type.

The year was also the first time I implemented a class-specific parasitic archetype. For those of you unfamiliar, a “parasitic” archetype, card, or mechanic refer to cards that only work in the context of the expansion they’re added to. As far as class-specific examples go, think of something like Librams, Relics, or Jade Golems. Despite the choice of words, an archetype, card, or mechanic being “parasitic” does not automatically make it bad (hence why I chose to pursue one), but it does present its own elements to be weary of that wouldn’t be factors to consider for mechanics supported over multiple sets.

The archetype in question is the “Deathwalker” archetype, which continually grow stronger as more of them die. March of the Lich King is naturally all about Undeads and harnessing death.

Are there any other cards you wish to highlight for any reason?

There are a LOT of cards that I would want to mention for this section, but I will limit it to just 4:

  • Watcher of the Deep, which I was able to re-tool as an existing class card and win a competition with it.
  • Pocketwatch Connoisseur because of the guessing mechanic.
  • Resurgence to better demonstrate the push of Shadow spells I wanted to implement and the ways that it can be played.
  • And finally, Fesh Krieger for being a character that I've implemented quite a bit of the class's lore into, and also because of his deck-interaction mechanic. Your deck size still stays 30, but it adds a side-pile of 3 cards that you can fine-tune as you want.

Do you have anything behind the scenes you want to share with us? Do you want to share something to come later?

The only real thing I have to share is that the class wouldn’t be what it is without the group of friends that I interact with when I post card designs for the class. They’re all great people and I love seeing their classes get built as well as mine.

Two-Timing Tellni has also become a meme to that circle of friends which I find to be pretty funny.

Do you have anything else you want to share with us?

The next Core set and expansion should be announced very soon and I’m pretty excited for that.

That will do it for this installment. I'm glad to be back doing more FCS's, and I should be back with projects from other people. In the mean time, if you're interested in checking out this class that I've put a lot of years into, then click the banner below to see the whole project.