Cancel (Time Spiral) - Community - Gatherer

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Each Time Spiral card was an homage to at least one previously printed card.

This card is referencing Counterspell, right down to the original printing's art, as well as flavor text referencing the original art's famous 'melty fingers.' Also of note, Mark Poole is the same artist for both cards, and both contained self-portraits of Poole as he looked at the time.

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Posted By: Missile_Penguin (3/11/2012 1:48:38 AM)

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Aaron's Random Card Comment of the Day #27, 11/2/10

I distinctly remember two painful transitions that Magic underwent during my days as a player. The first was the printing of painlands (like Adarkar Wastes) in Ice Age. I had my forty Revised dual lands by then, and remember being puzzled by their removal from Fourth Edition, and later irritated that their so-called “replacements” were so much worse, and didn’t even span the enemy color pairs.

The second was the printing of the card Shock in Stronghold. Lightning Bolt had disappeared a few years prior, and we had been making due with Incinerate, which had a handy anti-regeneration clause on it which (kind of) justified its additional mana and avoided the dreaded “strictly worse” comparison. It was just “worse” than Lightning Bolt. And then Shock came along, broadc... (see all)

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Posted By: Aaron_Forsythe (11/2/2010 10:45:02 PM)

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Counterspells are an inherently powerful part of the game. Counterspells are an "easy" foil to most strategies.. just counter the key card of a combo or synergy and you actually nullify more than one card.

From the start I thought cancel is a fair cost for a hardcounter. I'm not saying it is a powerful card, but comparable to the fairness of doom blade or naturalize, or possibly Incinerate.

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Posted By: jinxedidol (8/16/2011 10:01:15 PM)

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@willpell: I agree with most of your reasoning, but not your conclusion :)

Cheap counterspells mean that games stagnate; it also makes it very hard to recover from an early fall behind. Imagine you're up against a deck full of Mana Leak, Deprive, Spell Pierce, Psychic Barrier, Negate... and that's from a quick Gatherer search of cards in Standard, CMC <=2, "counter target spell". Now, imagine that your opponent has four or five lands out, and you missed a couple of land drops and are stuck on two. Then you start drawing lands, and you now have a reasonable amount of mana. But your opponent counters every spell you cast, and meanwhile is attacking you, milling you, or proliferating poison counters onto you. You're behind the game, and you're going to STAY behind the game until you die, because your opponent needs only two open lands to stop you from doing things. You can't autocard... (see all)

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Posted By: Rosuav (6/5/2011 1:46:33 PM)

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Quoting willpell: "If you have a super-strong counterspell, but your opponent never actually casts a spell, you're just sitting there accomplishing nothing, which means all your opponent has to do is wait until your patience gives out and you squander your resources and give him an opening."

Try to play a game without ever casting a spell. Or actually try to wait til a control player 'squander' their grip of counterspells - something tells me that it just won't happen. You just made up these words since you want to bring back the dominance of blue just so you can watch your opponents writhe in pain for 10+ minutes a game, not being able to resolve a spell.

I play blue too (and every other color) and I win with Mana Leak and Cancel. Just 4 - 6 counterspells in a deck, and takes much more to play than your 'stop them all with super-strong counterspells' mindset.

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Posted By: Gabriel422 (6/11/2011 1:46:28 AM)

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