last-august asked: I love time travel stories, but time travel in the multiverse adds a whole new layer of rules. 1. Does time travel in one plane affect other planes. 2. If it does not does it affect planeswalkers who were originally from that plane. 3. Does it affect other planeswalkers that were present during changed events.

I usually like to let the story play out issues like these, rather than answer explicitly outside the text, but I think there’s been more anxiety about how we’re handling this story than we wanted. So here’s the rule of time travel we were assuming for this block: Altering the history of Tarkir only alters Tarkir.

In other words, we are not using the events of Tarkir to massively retcon the last 1280 years of Magic continuity across the entire Multiverse.

It was also our assumption, though, that planeswalkers who visited Tarkir sometime between 1280 years ago and now could experience time-travel-altered events and act differently on other planes due to those changed events — essentially, that planeswalkers were a way to transmit time-travel changes outside of Tarkir. That created some interesting story challenges, and I think you’ll see how we handled them as the story develops. For now, please continue to enjoy visiting Tarkir’s past. We’re getting to see a crucial, life-or-death tipping point in Tarkir’s history, when clans battle with dragons for survival, and a certain spirit dragon still lives — for now.