Wheel

Wheel
Mechanic
Introduced	Alpha
Last used	Final Fantasy Commander
Scryfall Statistics
cards

A Wheel (also Wheeling or Wheel effect) is an effect that causes each player to lose their hand and draw a completely new one, usually seven cards. They are named after the original card Wheel of Fortune, and many variations have been printed, primary in either the blue or red section of the color pie, and to a much lesser extent black. It can currently only be found in red. Wheel effects in blue now are typically printed as Timetwister effects.

Description

Wheel effects come in various forms, both in how the hand is dealt and how many cards to draw. Usually, the hand is discarded, but the hand could also be exiled, shuffled into the library with the graveyard, or put on the bottom of the library by itself. The number of cards drawn could be static or variable; common static numbers are two, three, four, and seven, while common variable ones are the greatest amount discarded or the same for each player as they had before. Some further designs give players a goal to achieve to increase the cards obtained, potentially going past the cap of seven. Black has two variants of Ill-Gotten Gains and Behold the Beyond, which return from the graveyard and tutor, respectively, and have the unique draw modifier of giving back fewer cards than previously in hand.

Wheels were very powerful forms of card advantage because they can easily refill an empty hand back to seven cards. Many of the older ones, such as the original Wheel of Fortune or Timetwister, are banned in Legacy. The symmetry is deceiving; oftentimes, your opponent will already have a full hand, making the wheel hugely lopsided. Wheels could also destroy the hand with which your opponent started, giving them a new hand that could be terrible, without the possibility of a mulligan. For this reason, newer designs are rarely symmetrical, and those that are are much more expensive.

These effects combined caused wheels to gain notoriety in the Tempest/Urza blocks Standard environment; it was fairly common on turn one to cast a bunch of artifacts that produced cheap mana and then cast Windfall or Time Spiral to refill your hand and wreck your opponent's. Wheel effects contributed to the "just slightly overpowered" Standard environment that caused a formal Development team to be created.

There's a big debate in R&D as to whether this is supposed to be a red ability. It is a raw form of card advantage that is supposed to be something red is bad at. For now, it stays in the red part of the color pie. More recently, the compromise has been made for red that the set number is three, seen first on Chandra Ablaze. This gives Red the ability more often and puts it closer in card advantage capacity to Blue and Black's card draw spells, while giving it its own texture. With excess cards in hand, wheeling for three begins to act closer to rummaging than the wheels of old.

Timespiraling

Timespiraling is a slang term used by Magic R&D to describe spells that enables or forces a player to shuffle their hand and graveyard into their library, and then draw seven cards. It is named after the eponymous Time Spiral from Urza's Saga, although it was first seen on Timetwister in Alpha. The effect is primary in blue.

The major differences compared to Wheeling are how it shuffles the graveyard into the library, and seven is rarely deviated from. This also generally leaves it as being symmetrical, as it has a greater risk of backfiring. Shuffling the graveyard tends to concentrate the remaining library, as drawn lands stay on the battlefield. Like with wheels, fast mana artifacts are key to breaking the symmetry in the caster's favor. The effect is mostly flavored as a reset of time.

Wheel variants

Blue

• Finale of Revelation
• Flux
• Trenzalore Clocktower
• Temporal Cascade

Red

• Bomat Courier (second and third abilities combined)
• Cavalier of Flame
• Chance
• Chandra, Heart of Fire
• Chaos Balor
• Connecting the Dots (abilities combined)
• The Flame of Keld (first and second ability combined)
• Illuminate History
• Imposing Grandeur
• Incendiary Command
• Into the Fire
• Into the Night
• Mindmoil
• Mishra's Command
• Neheb, Dreadhorde Champion
• Phyrexian Harvester
• Subira, Tulzidi Caravanner (second and third ability combined)
• Valakut Awakening

Multicolored

• Abian, Luvion Usurper (Test card)
• Ancient Excavation
• Arjun, the Shifting Flame
• Carnage Interpreter (investigate as cards)
• Celes, Rune Knight
• Flamewar, Brash Veteran//Flamewar, Streetwise Operative
• Worldpurge

Colorless

• Embrace My Diabolical Vision (Scheme)
• Pools of Becoming (Plane)
• Teferi's Puzzle Box