Counterbore is the mono-blue version of this that functions as countermagic. This functions more like Duress in that you have to pluck it out of their hand in order for it to work.
Memoricide and Thought Hemorrhage escape this situationality by allowing you to name the card you want to murder, with Memoricide being more mono-black friendly and Thought Hemorrhage being more powerful in that it can also act as a souped up Blightning.
Posted By:
DacenOctavio
(2/8/2011 1:37:59 PM)
As per Clavat 99's comment, since you're already running UB, may as well run Telepathy instead of Glasses of Urza. Works especially well in multiplayer, since that way you can pick out the deck whose key card seems the most threatening and disable it.
Posted By:
Lyoncet
(2/20/2011 8:22:20 PM)
Despite a bit worse than Thought Hemorrhage, it's still a great card!
Posted By:
Paolino
(1/13/2012 3:17:11 AM)
this and urza's glasses or gitaxian probe
Posted By:
bearmeister
(3/27/2012 8:13:41 AM)
The UB card.
Posted By:
AdOutAce
(10/26/2012 1:52:56 PM)
I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me...
Posted By:
Continue
(6/1/2013 7:29:46 PM)
Quite the powerful combo killer. If the price was just one colorless more aggressive I'm sure it would see multiformat play.
Posted By:
Kryptnyt
(1/9/2014 6:17:58 PM)
Slaughter Games seems to have be better
Posted By:
homerlaw
(1/22/2014 10:55:39 PM)
To those of you saying slaughter games and thought hemorrhage are better: there are advantages to either kind. With this card, you get the certainty that you can exile a card in their hand so it has immediate impact. With the other cards you get slightly more choice, and if they play a combo deck they can wreck them, but if they just don't happen to have the named card in hand they can be irrelevant. If you use other targeted discard, then you most likely know what's in their hand and the others become better (and you know when to cast this one), but Lobotomy is often more useful just because you know it'll get something.
Posted By:
Aremath
(2/27/2014 11:55:22 PM)
Unless you're relying on this to randomly maybe get a non-basic land, any deck running this would probably be better served with Memoricide. The latter is rare, but it costs about the same as this on the secondary market.
The need for the card to be in the target player's hand is just too big a drawback, at least in my experience.
Posted By:
Mainstay
(6/3/2014 1:59:48 PM)