Pointed Discussion

A sorcery search spell needs to put the card into the player's hand to be worth it.

Personally I think this should be able to tutor up instants as well, since "sorcery" in portal basically meant "instant or sorcery." This card would have been able to find counterspells in portal gameplay, why restrict that effect in Oracle?

Everyone complaining about this card not searching for instants, please listen.

Portal didn't have instants. Even the counterspell was a sorcery. It didn't mean "instant or sorcery," it meant sorcery. Wizards thought the target audience for Portal would be too confused by anything faster than sorcery speed.

That said, the only reason we even talk about this card is because Mystical Tutor got banned in Legacy. Yes, we all want it to be Mystical Tutor. But then it would be banned too, and combo decks would have been even more broken when they were legal.

As it is, the card works just fine in some combo decks, still being able to grab a Reanimate or Doomsday. Is it ideal? No. But it still works as the most effective non-Grim tutor for those decks, and when paired with the ability to draw cards, the "top of deck" clause doesn't even hurt that much.

Strictly worse than Ponder, but strictly better than Preordain.
Discuss.

@Woozly You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means

Woozly, this spell doesn't cantrip, while both Ponder and Preordain do.

If Portal had instants it would probably search instants or maybe both

Would be silly to say this is worse than anything else due to Portal's mechanic restrictions

Any tutor cards that searches for anything for 1 mana to be put into your hand is close to ban territory with the array of game ending stuff readily available

I'm pretty sure if this was titled "Impersonal Tutor" you could find instants.

This card tripled in price practically overnight once Temporal Mastery was spoiled.

I've had a copy of this for years but haven't had any use for it. Thanks to Temporal Mastery and other miracles, that problem has been fixed.

@chaosfire- your example proves the point that this card's original function was to find instants and sorceries: mystic denial and other sorceries from that set which interact on the opponent's turn have been eratta'd to instants to fix their functionality. Personal tutor originally would have been able to find these cards and has lost that functionality due to wizards selectively updating its wording inconsistently with updating the spell type of the other cards. The counterspell similarly lost functionality this way by only being able to counter sorceries when it would have been able to hit the other cards that have been changed to instants.

If the argument is that the card should function as its printed text indicates- it doesn't do that with other portal cards and there are a host of examples of cards that don't do anything near what is printed.

If the argument is that wiz changed all of these cards to preserve functionality, my first paragraph shows how they did this inconsistently...so this isn't it either

This is power-level errata that doesn't preserve the original intent of the card disguised as a preservation of its text. Finding instants may be counter-intuitive based on the text...but virtually everyone playing with this card would be aware of its errata (similar to people who play with time vault...or floral spuzzem...I mean, is there really someone still waiting for the plant to decide what to do(as written)?

I always wondered why this card doesn't see play. Then I noticed the absence of the word 'Instant' everywhere on the card.

Regardless, combos with Miracles, I suppose.

Yeah, it should be changed to include instants and be an instant itself!!
/end sarcasm... 1 mana tutor is still broken no matter how you look at it. Moving on.

@Woozly, it's d-bag comments and attitudes like yours that make people on Gatherer want to gouge their eyes out with their own cards.