I'm having difficulty understanding this card. MTG?

Question

The card is called Temporal Distortion

http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?&id=23212

I don't really understand it's capabilities or purpose. So the card makes creatures and lands unable to untap, but only till the end of turn. So no Horseshoe crab effects or Early Harvests.... But that's all I see it doing. Was this card made to nerf morphling? or High Tide decks? I'm a little confused.

Answer 1

So basically it means creatures and lands take extra time to untap.

If you build a deck based on this, then it can give you an advantage. For example, creatures which you pay to untap like phyrexian colossus ( http://sales.starcitygames.com/cardsearc... ) cards like Voltaic Key ( http://sales.starcitygames.com/cardsearc... ) that untap stuff for mana, and especially cards that are "free" like Rewind ( http://store.tcgplayer.com/item.asp?id=1... ) where you can untap the land again afterwards.

Don't forget cards that don't tap when they attack, such as Serra Angel or Zephyr Falcon too.

The lands don't untap until the start of the players next turn, not the start of anyones turn (it says At the beginning of each player's upkeep, remove all hourglass counters from permanents **that** player controls)

Answer 2

It makes it so that players cannot untap things that were tapped the turn before.

The steps are Untap, Upkeep, Draw......

When a land or creature gets tapped, it gets an hourglass counter.  During the untap step, they cannot untap.  Then during the upkeep step, the counters get removed so that the next turn, they can untap as normal.  This helps against decks that cannot untap unless it goes through the untap step.  Like Stompy where they want big creatures out fast to beat face.  If their lands are tapped, then they have to wait an extra turn to play it.  If they attack, then they can't untap to beat face again next turn.  It's nice in blue since blue can have trouble with creatures that are untargetable or uncounterable.  You can stop them every other turn.