Welcome back to the Rules Tips Blog! Today we’ll be going over a particularly spicy card from Amonkhet: As Foretold. On the surface, it’s a pretty simple enchantment; every turn it gets a Time Counter, and every turn you can free-cast a spell with converted mana cost equal to or less than the number of Time Counters it has. So the turn after you play it, you get a free 1-drop; the next turn, a free 2-drop, etc, etc. However, beneath that surface is a lot of depth! First, As Foretold doesn’t work with other alternate costs, because you can’t pay multiple alternate costs. It won’t work with Flashback, for example. It WILL allow you to cast cards from other zones, as long as it isn’t an alternate cost; if you have a Future Sight showing off something cheap enough for As Foretold to Foretell, you can cast it from your library! It also doesn’t get around the rules of timing or whether or not you can cast something; you can free-cast a Gravecrawler from your graveyard, but only if you actually have a Zombie, otherwise you can’t cast it. Likewise, you can’t use As foretold to free-cast a Sorcery in response to something; timing rules still apply. You CAN still pay additional costs (like Kicker, or Escalate), but those aren’t covered by As Foretold; you’ll have to actually pay them.

Now, onto the FUN stuff. As Foretold lets you get off one ‘free’ spell per turn- that includes your opponent’s! You can use it to cast something on your turn, and then throw down an Instant or a card with Flash for free during their turn, too. Having an As Foretold set to 3 might let you trick your opponent into thinking you can’t counter their spells while tapped out, but you can throw down a Cancel to stop their plans dead in their tracks! It also works very well with split cards, surprisingly, because you’re only looking at the CMC of the half you want to cast. It’ll work with Aftermath, too! The place where it falls a bit short is X spells. Since you’re paying an alternate cost via As Foretold, and that cost doesn’t include X in it, any X spells you cast via As Foretold have to be for X=0. As Foretold on 10 counters can cast Earthquake… for 0. And you have no option to pay into it if you want a bigger X, unfortunately!

But what’s really fun, is it works very well with the cycle of cards from Future Sight that have no mana cost (Restore Balance, Ancestral Vision, Living End, Wheel of Fate, Hypergenesis, and Lotus Bloom). The trick with these is that they have no mana cost, and you can’t pay a cost that doesn’t exist, so the ONLY way to cast them is via alternate costs (like Suspend, which they have natively). As Foretold is an alternate cost that you CAN pay, so it’ll work here! Since they have a CMC of 0 (due to having no mana cost), you can cast any of these as soon as As Foretold hits the board, without any counters at all. And since As Foretold lets you cast things with a mana cost equal to or less than, you can keep jamming one of these spells every turn, no matter how many counters As Foretold has!

Finally, a few tidbits: If you have multiple copies of As Foretold, their effects aren’t “used up” at the same time; you pick which one you’re applying, and the others are still ready. So if you have three of them out, you can jam up to three free spells per turn. Also, speaking of Time Spiral, the enchantment doesn’t care where the Time counters came from. You can put more on with Proliferate, with effects like Quarry Hauler, or with time counters from Time Spiral block, like via Clockspinning or Dust of Moments to speed up the prophecies!

Today’s Rules Tip was written by Trevor Nunez