Ah, Time Warp. A card which allows every mystic to rewrite history for the cost of a single resource. But Time Warp is not a perfect reset, as the clause "...except for the playing of Time Warp and its costs" ensures that Time Warp does not undo its own costs. This restriction prevents any shenanigans involving repeatedly playing Time Warp.

Or does it?

• Overview

• The Time Loop

• Supporting Cast

• Caveats

• Advanced Time Travel

• Idle Musings

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• The setup is as follows:

  • Bestow Resolve, Scrying Mirror, and Robes of Endless Night in play.
  • Prescient in hand.
  • Time Warp in the discard pile.

• The loop:

  1. Take an action (or have a friend take an action) at your location which involves a skill test.
  2. Exhaust Scrying Mirror to reveal the chaos token.
     1. If you are satisfied with the token, allow the skill test to resolve as normal.
     2. If not, proceed to step 3.
  3. Commit Prescient, using Bestow Resolve if necessary to commit to a non- test. Name the type of the chaos token revealed in step 2.
  4. After the skill test ends, the delayed effect of Prescient will trigger. Use this to fetch Time Warp from the discard.
  5. Immediately play Time Warp, exhausting Robes of Endless Night to reduce its cost to zero.
  6. Return to step 1. Repeat until you find true love or pull a , whichever comes first.

• Why does it work?

  • Even though Time Warp's cost is not undone, Robes has reduced its cost to zero, so we don't lose any resources. Note that while Robes modifies the cost of Time Warp, its ability is not itself a part of Time Warp's cost. This is because cost modifications are calculated before the cost is paid (see the "Initiation Sequence" section of the rules). Since Robes is part of neither the playing of Time Warp nor its cost, its state is reset by Time Warp, and so its ability can be used again for the next iteration of the loop.
  • Since Time Warp starts in the discard pile, the fact that it is discarded during step 5 is not a problem for us.
  • Everything else is reset by Time Warp.

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• Most of the non-combo cards can be replaced with others to taste, though I'd recommend keeping Deny Existence and Ward of Protection since they can help you protect your combo.

• Other notable inclusions:

  • Tetsuo Mori can help you find Robes of Endless Night or Scrying Mirror, or recur Scrying Mirror from the discard.
  • Sacred Covenant and Ward of Radiance are very nice with Diana's ability, but probably should be replaced if your team doesn't have a lot of generation.

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The time loop can only be resolved once per round, since Scrying Mirror will be exhausted once you find a token that you are happy with.

In addition, the time loop can be broken if:

• You or the target investigator would be defeated.
• You or the target investigator would move.

The deck has a few cards to mitigate this, namely Tetsuo Mori, Safeguard, and Dodge.

• While in many cases a is the best possible outcome, the time loop doesn't have to end on a ; you can pick any outcome you want. So if you have, say or synergies, you can use the time loop to pull an arbitrary number of these tokens.

• Since the combo is only limited by Scrying Mirror secrets, one straightforward way to greatly increase the power of the combo is to have everyone in the group run the Mirror.

• The time loop can be used to gather information. For example, if a player has Pocket Telescope, this can be used to peek at a location on each iteration of the loop. Likewise, any cards drawn during the loop are returned to their respective decks by Time Warp in the order that they were drawn, which allows you to know the top card(s) of these decks.

• Heirloom of Hyperborea seems to have a very strange interaction with the loop - since the playing of Time Warp is not undone, it would seem that after Time Warp is played, Heirloom can draw a card. However, Heirloom's ability is not part of the subsequent action, so it would seem that this card draw would not be undone by the next Time Warp. This would then result in an infinite card draw engine.

I ran a slightly modified version of this deck in a standalone (Machinations Through Time, fittingly), and it does take a long time to get the combo set up. It was pretty fun to pilot, but probably this deck is a bit too wacky to run in a campaign - too many ways to break the game. Still, if breaking the game is your thing... then good luck and happy time traveling!