See Whispers of Jukai.

Is this an elaborate joke? How many times are people going get to do something meaningful with a Disallow that's cast when the creature deals combat damage to the opponent? Most likely you would be able to counter your own combat damage triggers, such as cipher, but that's pointless outside of some super niche where a creature has a negative trigger out of combat damage.

I would btw include the reminder text for the cipher in these.

Agree having cipher reminder text would be useful. And also agree that cipher doesn't really work well with a thing you need to do on demand. Which is unfortunate, as the card title suggests, when you want a needed card for the set to also exhibit your chosen mechanic.

I'm not really sure what to suggest. "You may counter the next spell cast this turn"? Feels like it's likely to whiff and not be very useful to you. And... nope, can't cipher onto an opponents creature to at least be able to maybe lock down their main2.

I think you'll probably need to change to something that can affect board state as well as spells. "Return target spell or permanenet to its owner's hand." would work, maybe?

The whole point was to make a card with cipher that needed to be an instant, since one of the rules in Gatecrash was that cipher could only go on sorceries. How to make it useful is up to the player :)

The problem being - a counterspell at that point in time is never going to be useful. The opponent can see it coming, and so can just arrange to use whatever it is before the enciphered creature deals damage.

I'm quite positive for this to never counter any spell from triggering, but it can do so on the first cast and then later might counteract e. g. a Dread.

It's not much, but you get it as an add-on to a slightly more expensive uncommon Disallow. I think, the major problem is that the increase in mana value on a counterspell is of such a major impact that this small additional upside is not worth it.

I'd say put it in a set with enrage.

Exactly. It's not that your opponent won't cast spells into it when its encoded, it's that they can't. The only things subsequent triggers can be on the stack above are other combat damage triggers. Stopping enrage in an option, or maybe negating drawbacks like Leyline Phantom

As I said, those uses cases are so niche and obscure that this is going to confuse players more than anything else. I don't think having players to start argue about what this does or means in the middle of a game is a good idea.

I would recommend at least moving it to rare if you really wanna go forward with this. As far as having a "basic functionality card/effect slightly varied with a set mechanic" goes, this is a really bad one given how high its intuitive comprehension is xD

I find it especially troubling that the "base card" makes perfect sense while the usage it's supposed to be highlighting, that with the keyword, is going to be completely lost for most players and vast majority of play scenarios. It's essentially antithetical to the idea of a keyword use-case highlight.

I'll list few citations here to point out just how insidious this type of stuff can be and why it should be taken seriously.

> "Scornful Egotist, from Scourge, isn't confusing in what it says. It's a 1/1 with morph for . The problem is that many players didn't understand the eight-mana cost. For those unfamiliar with Scourge, it had a "converted mana cost matters" theme. Scornful Egotist's high converted mana cost was considered a bonus for the card (you got it into play using the morph). Unfortunately, this theme didn't draw as much attention to itself as it could and the card just ended up baffling many players because they couldn't comprehend why the card was doing what it did."

> "Intuitive comprehension is all about players understanding and accepting what they read. When the words don't make sense because of context, it can be just as confusing as when they don't make sense inherently. I'm not saying we shouldn't make these kinds of cards just stressing that we have to accept that they are more complex than one would realize at first glance."

- source: "New World Order"

Similar scenario:

> "One with Nothing has but three words of rules text, yet baffles a lot of players. Why? Because it's instructing players to do something they don't understand why they would want to do. What happens is that players read the text and because they don't understand how it would be used, they assume they are misunderstanding something and thus convince themselves they don't understand it even though they comprehend the words."

- source: "Lenticular Design"