WotC is pushing green way too much and printing way too much anti-blue hate. It's time for blue to fight back, for their rights and freedom.

It's true, green is being pushed very hard. I think pushed hate cards are bad for the game. Making pushed hate cards in response to other pushed hate cards is even worse.

nah that's normal business for professional card designers like wotc. i.e. don't like your creatures dying? regenerate! opponents creatures regenerating too much? clause where they can't regenerate! removal getting around regenerate? undying, persist! you hate creatures coming back from the grave? exile! hate your opponents for targeting your stuff? shroud, hexproof! hate your opponents stopping you from targeting their stuff? Glaring Spotlight

I'm quite aware that it's what they do. I don't agree with it.

I don't have a problem with this sort of card in general. It's just a green hose... the game's had plenty of those. I'd be more bothered if a specific blue hose card was designed to stop a specific green hose card. When you layer that problem three times, you've left the realm of sanity. For example:

"Whenever a creature with protection from blue is returned to its owner's hand by a spell an opponent controls, draw five cards"

...is just plain wrong. At some point, the card stopped being a magical spell, and became a sledgehammer for round pegs.

All that said, this creature's power and toughness are probably too good. I've yet to see Wizards print a straight 2/2 flyer for without a drawback. It might be appropriate if creature creep lasts through to 2017, but not right now. Make it a 2/1, though, and I'll call it fair.

that's another thing about current design direction that messes up the color pie and metagame in general.

So Wizards is moving towards a creature-based interaction. But not all colors are equal since some colors have much better creatures. How is that fair for weaker colors? How can blue and black compete fairly on this new world order where creatures dominate, when they get weaker creatures?

So Wizards throws them a bone once in a while. What happens is, even if they only get ONE over the curve creature, the entire playerbase cries foul. Whereas green, white, and red can have easily 10 creatures over the curve, it's just the norm.

So the obvious solution is for blue and black to have better noncreature spells. But that isn't the solution players want, either. Spells too strong diminish the creatures of other colors. Then control would dominate, but players apparently hate playing against control because their beautiful creature decks wouldn't win as much.

So what we're left with is, players want blue and black to have both weaker creatures and weaker spells, while green, white, and red creatures and spells continue to power-creep upwards nonchalantly.

[Shrug]. Your argument seems to be based on the fact that Cancel and Doom Blade aren't spectacularly good cards. But they are. White and green removal aren't as good as blue, black and sometimes red. They didn't need to creep the power level of those cards up, because those cards always are good.

All you have to do is look at a pile of decklists from the 20th century, and you'll see that 50% of the cards in the decks were removal. Now it's closer to 20% or so, which gives creatures the ability to swing and interact. Blue still has some of the worst creatures in the game because it has some of the best spells. I don't have a problem with blue having creatures of equivalent size to green, in theory, but the end result would be upping blue's counterspells to cost .

We could do that. Or we could just play a different game... there's plenty out there where the colors are evenly matched. I like many of them. One of the benefits of playing Magic, however, is that the roles of the colors are well-defined. It seems a shame to me to throw away the flavor and identity of the game for a sake of 'fairness'.

Because it's creating a divide between blue and the other colors. You want to play a creature deck? DON'T play blue since they don't have many good creatures. OTOH, you want to play control or midrange? Pick any colors. Esper, grixis, jund, naya, bant, any will work.

You want to teach a new player? Give him green, white, or red aggro deck. Why not blue? because, 1, their creatures suck, 2, it's a higher learning curve, 3, blue wasn't designed as the easy color. It's like playing a different game. On the one hand, it's what makes blue special, on the other hand, it also makes it the most hated color amongst newbies and people who play "for fun".

Why does blue get different treatment? When Jund and Valakut dominated standard, no cards were banned and life went on. But when blue starts to win, everyone complains and stops playing, then the banhammer comes down and anti-blue hate comes one after another.

(You know, I wrote this first paragraph as an argument against your last paragraph, but I think I'm going to delete it. Why? Because it's arguable. I don't think Jund needed bannings, and Jace needed to be banned. But the truth is that I don't think either of us are capable of backing up our arguments on that subject, so I'm dropping it. Petty bickering over individual cards probably won't win me any points, anyway.)

It's true: Blue is not an easy color to absorb, and blue decks are probably not the first decks to show a new player. I'd say the same for white and red. Control decks are hard to play, and aggro decks are hard to play well. You really want to show new players mid-range, which is the dominion of green and black. But I don't really think that that makes green and black 'the fun colors'.

Fun is in the eye of the beholder. I play for fun all the time (really, I have a major problem with the uber-Spikes, too). But just because dropping solid creatures on the board is fun, doesn't mean I can't have fun trying to find ways to slip a Stealer of Secrets past my opponent's defenses. When the creatures of a color are as good or better than the spells, I no longer need to rely on my spells to help win my game. That's a fine way to play... it's the philosophy of green after all. But I don't think every color should have that play style, otherwise the game becomes boring, since all the colors begin to act the same.

I want a color to have bad creatures. It doesn't have to be blue, specifically, but it would suck if non-creature spells were superfluous. However, I personally like it when creatures are the main feature of most magic play-styles. In this sense, blue being a notch behind on power fits my ideal of "Mostly about creatures, but sometimes not".

I get the impression that you enjoy playing green, but like the flavor of blue. Therefore, you'd like blue to be more like green. It's a good idea in principle, but the other people who love blue the way it is will fight you ever step of the way... that response shouldn't be surprising, but welcomed, since finding ways to convert those players is a real challenge.