Magic Alpha Timetwister

The fair one in an unfair set

Timetwister is the ninth and strangest member of the Power Nine, the group of cards from Magic: The Gathering's first sets that are regarded as the strongest ever printed. The other eight give their caster something for almost nothing: free mana, extra cards, an extra turn. Timetwister makes every player shuffle hand and graveyard back into the library and draw a fresh seven cards. Then Timetwister itself goes to its owner's graveyard.

On paper that helps both players. In practice the player who casts it chooses the moment, ideally after emptying a hand onto the table while the opponent is still holding cards. It costs three mana, one of them blue, and is one of three blue cards in the Power Nine, alongside Ancestral Recall and Time Walk.

The game's designers believed during playtesting that the scarcity of these cards would keep them from overwhelming games. As print runs grew that reasoning failed, and the Power Nine were dropped from the core set with the Revised Edition. Timetwister was printed only in Alpha, Beta and Unlimited, all in 1993.

Mark Tedin's dissolving warrior

Mark Tedin is one of the original 25 artists who painted the first Magic cards. He grew up in southeastern Alaska, studied fine art at Gonzaga University in Spokane and earned a master of fine arts in studio painting at Washington University in St. Louis, and settled in Seattle. He went on to work for Wizards of the Coast as a concept artist and art director, and helped build the company's first style guide.

His Timetwister shows a witch's hands working a spell while a frightened warrior begins to dissolve, painted in the layered, impressionistic style that runs through his early work. Much of that early art is considered iconic, and Magic players later voted him to illustrate the first card designed by the player community.

The game itself came from Richard Garfield, a mathematics doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, and Peter Adkison, a Boeing systems analyst who had founded Wizards of the Coast near Seattle. The young company paid several of its first artists in company shares because it could not afford cash.

The summer Magic sold out

Wizards found the money to manufacture its first order only after Adkison demonstrated the game at the Origins Game Fair and came home with $40,000 in funding. The game went on general release on August 5, 1993. At Gen Con in Milwaukee that month, the shipment, reported as 2.5 million cards, arrived a day late and still sold out by the end of the show.

The Alpha print run is widely reported at 2.6 million cards. It held 295 different cards, 116 of them rares, and rares were printed on their own sheets in the smallest numbers; the usual estimate is about 1,100 of each. Alpha came in 60-card starter decks with two rares and 15-card boosters with one, and the rare typically sat at the front of the pack. By October 1993 the game had sold out its supply of 10 million cards, and a second run, Beta, followed.

That year Jurassic Park opened, Intel shipped the first Pentium chips, and the Chicago Bulls won a third straight NBA title.

From the bargain of Power to a Commander favorite

Wizards made the Power Nine permanent rarities in March 1996, when it created the Reserved List of cards it promised never to reprint. In tournament play Timetwister is now banned in Legacy and restricted to one copy in Vintage. Unlike the rest of the Power Nine, it is legal in Commander.

That legality changed its place in the market. A 2026 guide to the Power Nine notes that Timetwister was long the most affordable piece of Power but has climbed sharply because it is legal and popular in Commander, and now ranks among the more expensive of the nine.

Very few Alpha Timetwisters have survived in high grade. PSA's CardFacts page for the Alpha card lists 14 copies at PSA 9 and 3 at PSA 10. Its sales record shows one PSA 9 selling at an online auction on April 15, 2019, for $10,655. Other PSA 9 sales are hard to pin down: one sale cited at $10,501 in February 2023 could not be confirmed on a page fetched for this story.

Higher grades have run far past that. A PSA 10 copy, one of three, sold at auction on April 21, 2023, for $84,000; one magazine later reported the figure as $86,000. Copies graded by other services trade below it: a BGS 9 Alpha Timetwister sold for $23,095 in April 2021, and BGS 8 and 8.5 copies have sold between about $10,000 and $18,200 since then.

How to know an Alpha copy

Alpha, Beta and Unlimited share the same Tedin art and wording, so the frame does the identifying. Unlimited, released in December 1993, has white borders. Alpha and Beta are both black-bordered, but the printer used different corner-cutting dies for the Beta run, and Alpha cards have noticeably more rounded corners. Alpha cards carry no set symbol and no number; modern databases list Timetwister as card 84 of the Alpha set.

Because the same card exists in three 1993 printings, a buyer should confirm that the grading label reads Alpha. PSA 9 means Mint, one step below the top grade; on a black-bordered card, edge chipping and centering are what separate a 9 from an 8.

The reset button

Wizards has tried to recapture Timetwister's effect at a fairer price. The Alliances expansion included Diminishing Returns, designed as a substitute with a higher in-game cost. The Power Nine reached Magic: The Gathering Arena in September 2022 through the Alchemy: Dominaria United set, but the paper card stays off-limits to reprints.

Among collectors, the card that used to be the entry point to owning Power now competes with the rest of the set. Its symmetry, the thing that once made it the cheapest of the nine, has not kept it from becoming a Commander favorite.

The numbers

Set

Limited Edition Alpha, 295 cards (116 rares); about 2.6 million cards printed

Alpha rares

An estimated 1,100 copies of each

Card

Blue sorcery, cost 2U; collector number 84

PSA population

PSA 10: 3; PSA 9: 14; PSA 8: 24; PSA 7: 9 (PSA CardFacts)

Tournament status

Restricted in Vintage, banned in Legacy, legal in Commander; on the Reserved List

Timeline

1. 1991

   Richard Garfield pitches a collectible card game to Peter Adkison of Wizards of the Coast.

2. Aug 5, 1993

   Limited Edition Alpha goes on general release, with Timetwister among its rares.

3. Oct 1993

   The Beta run follows; 10 million cards have sold out.

4. Dec 1993

   White-bordered Unlimited edition is released, the last printing of Timetwister.

5. Mar 1996

   Wizards creates the Reserved List; the Power Nine will never be reprinted.

6. Jun 20, 2016

   A grading-company survey of the Alpha set repeats the estimate of about 1,100 copies of each rare.

7. Apr 15, 2019

   An Alpha PSA 9 Timetwister sells at online auction for $10,655.

8. Apr 28, 2021

   A BGS 9 Alpha Timetwister sells for $23,095.

9. Sep 2022

   The Power Nine are added to Magic: The Gathering Arena.

10. Apr 21, 2023

    An Alpha PSA 10, one of three, sells at auction for $84,000.

The world in 1993

• Feb 26, 1993

  A van bomb explodes beneath the World Trade Center's North Tower in New York.

• Mar 22, 1993

  Intel ships the first Pentium chips.

• Apr 19, 1993

  The Waco standoff ends in a fire that kills 76 people.

• Jun 11, 1993

  Jurassic Park opens in theaters.

• Jun 20, 1993

  The Chicago Bulls win their third straight NBA championship.

• Aug 1, 1993

  The Great Flood of 1993 on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers reaches its peak.

• Nov 30, 1993

  President Clinton signs the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Magic Alpha Timetwister is number 65 of 100 in the trading cards entries of the FLOAT 100. 97 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (83 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Timetwister is the only Power Nine card that helps the opponent as much as its caster, at least on paper.
• It is legal in Commander, which turned it from the cheapest piece of Power into one of the pricier ones.
• Artist Mark Tedin was voted by players to illustrate the first player-designed Magic card.
• Only three Alpha Timetwisters have reached PSA 10; one sold for $84,000 in 2023.
• Wizards printed Diminishing Returns in Alliances as a costlier stand-in for Timetwister.