Forcing a turn to end is one of the scarier things you can do in Magic: The Gathering. Any spells and abilities that are on the stack fade into exile, and any actions that could have been taken are lost. While players have ample ways to end their own turns for a small cost, forcing the end of an opponent’s turn is excruciatingly expensive.
The cheapest way you can do this is three mana, but in exchange, you lose the game on your next end step. With the exception of Glorious End, ending your opponent’s turn costs six mana at the least. That makes Ultima one of the cheaper spells that can potentially pull this off.
Ultima
Ultima remains one of the scariest pieces of magic a player can pull off in the Final Fantasy franchise. Capable of dealing incomparable amounts of damage, this is a disaster for any opponent. Considering this, Wizards of the Coast has appropriated Ultima’s flavor into Magic’s ecosystem quite well.
For five mana, Ultima is a rather on-rate boardwipe for Standard. Most five-mana wipes offer some sort of additional benefit beyond destroying creatures. Ultima also gets rid of artifacts, but as a baffling additional effect, it ends the turn immediately. There’s certainly some combo potential to be had, especially if you’re trying to skip a detrimental trigger that occurs at your end step. For the most part, however, Ultima’s end turn clause will be a slight downside.
That said, Ultima has massive potential thanks to this turn-ending effect. If players can find efficient ways to cast this card at instant speed, it might become the most powerful five-mana spell that control has ever seen. The card will essentially function as a five-mana board wipe that can counter anything on the stack. You can even cast it before an opponent’s draw step to skip their turn entirely.
Casting Ultima on Your Opponent’s Turn
So, how do we cast this card at instant speed? Teferi, Time Raveler is the most powerful way to do this. The Planeswalker essentially forces your opponent to play at sorcery speed, and gives your sorceries Flash as an uptick. This means that, not only can you cast Ultima on your opponent’s turn, but they can’t even respond to it.
Five-mana board wipes rarely go the distance in Modern, but this combo may be an exception. Ultima and Teferi both delete any advantage your opponent has on the board state, and cause the combo to function as an extra turn spell. Thanks to the presence of Cori-Steel Cutter and 8-Mox decks in Modern, getting rid of artifacts is very attractive at the moment. Despite being difficult to recur thanks to Ultima exiling itself on the stack, this combo is easily powerful enough to see play in Modern, and will likely be experimented with in control decks.
Ultima in Standard
In Standard, there are some options to cast Ultima at instant speed, but they’re far less interesting. High Fae Trickster and Heliod, Radian Dawn certainly accomplish this, but Valley Floodcaller remains the best option for Standard. That said, unlike Teferi, all of the Flash pieces in Standard get wiped by the effect of Ultima, which makes this combo a lot less powerful.
Since Valley Floodcaller can come down at instant speed, there is a chance that players experiment with this, but losing your enabler to the Ultima might make this a bit too resource-intensive for control decks. The good news is that Ultima doesn’t need instant-speed shenanigans to see Standard play.
As a standalone board wipe in Standard, Ultima might be a lot better than it looks. Observing it purely as a boardwipe leaves it outshone by Day of Judgment and Sunfall, but artifacts are incredibly relevant in Standard at the moment.
Putting the Azorius artifacts deck aside, Cori-Steel Cutter rules the entire format. Ultima is capable of both wiping the board and getting rid of the annoying equipment. This might be what control needs to stave off the Prowess menace after Temporary Lockdown leaves the format.
Lockdown will likely remain the better option while that card is still Standard legal, but it has already become excruciatingly clear that Temporary Lockdown alone is not enough to beat Prowess. Most decks need a combination of Lockdown and another hate piece, like High Noon or Authority of the Consuls, to truly put Prowess in check.
This could also be accomplished with the combination of Ultima and Temporary Lockdown in Standard control decks. There is a chance that Ultima is too slow against Prowess, but if control decks can construct themselves to routinely survive until turn five, Ultima blows them out. This might see play in Pioneer for similar reasons.
Of course, Ultima is also going to be a decent card in Commander. Artifacts are incredibly relevant in that format, and there are a variety of ways to cast the card at instant speed. Thanks to the slower nature of Commander, you should have ample time to set the combo up, as well, but it will have a smaller impact on the game thanks to having four opponents.
All in all, Ultima fulfills a niche as its baseline that is needed in formats with smaller cardpools, and repurposes itself as a combo piece in older ones. This is a really interesting card design that massively scales in power level when more tools are available, and could pave the way for more diverse MTG cards in the future.
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