magic the gathering players are asking Wizards of the Coast to make a fairly substantial rule change for a certain mechanic, following the release of the latest set, “Kaldheim”.

Along with ‘Kaldheim’, one of the new highlight cards is Valki, the God of Lies. A legendary god with generic, black mana is… fine? It exiles creatures from your opponents’ hands when it enters the battlefield, and you can pay to have Valki become a copy of a creature that was exiled this way. It’s a nice, interesting card (although, as far as dark gods go, I think Tergrid is my favorite)… but it’s one of many double-sided modal cards in Kaldheim, which means that she has a different spell printed on the back.

On the other side is the true identity of Valki, Planeswalker Tibalt, Cosmic Impostor. Tibalt has long been a fan-favorite character who has had sadly bad cards. But Cosmic Impostor changes things up, letting you exile cards and play them. It’s a ridiculously good planeswalker card, potentially one of the best we’ve ever seen, but it’s a bit pricey at seven mana.

The problem is that the way Valki//Tibalt interacts with the Cascade mechanic. When you play a card with Cascade, then you exile the top card of your library until you find a nonland card that costs less than the first card you played. Then you can cast it without paying its mana cost. Cascade has always been a powerful mechanic that can quickly flood the board with large creatures, but, thanks to just a word in its official ruling, it causes serious problems in three different formats.

The problem is that Cascade only uses the lower mana cost to find a map you are eligible to play. Once found, you can then play on each side of a double-faced card without paying its mana cost. Play a three-mana creature with Cascade, hit a Valki to play, then cast the Tibalt side free, much sooner than you really should be able to.

This interaction has upset players of Vintage, Modern and Pioneer formats. In Rakdos (black/red) decks, it became incredibly popular in just a few weeks, Kaldheim was available and its price on the used market had almost tripled to reflect this popularity.

Any card becoming so immediately dominant on Eternal formats (formats that aren’t rated, like Standard and Brawl) is a big deal. Tibalt, Cosmic Impostor is here to stay now, and the format warping threat it poses is real.

However, unlike other big cards like Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath or Oko, Thief of Crowns, Tibalt, Cosmic Impostor could easily be made to fit more perfectly into eternal formats without having to resort to bans. As MTG Content Creator NiceKenobi says in his video, a nice and clean solution would be to adjust a single word in the Cascade rules: “card” to “spell”.

By having Cascade find and launch a to spell which costs less on a map, this limits the damage dealt by multi-sided cards like Valki // Tibalt. You’d be limited to only playing the Valki side unless you cascade down from an eight-mana or higher card, putting Tibalt firmly back in a reasonable curve. Even better, this change doesn’t really affect how Cascade is supposed to work because in most cases “spell” and “card” in this context work the same way. The only major difference I can think of is the waterfall in the Throne of Eldraine Adventure maps, but even that wouldn’t distort the formats as heavily as Tibalt.

In some ways, I kinda like that it’s Tibalt or all the characters that cause so much chaos. Whether it’s Tibalt’s Trickery eliminating Yidaro or Ugin in the second round, or Cosmic Impostor providing the impetus for significant rule changes, it seems fitting that the most chaotic and confusing character in the series either on the maps.