For Challenge # 142. Early Magic comes with a lot of crazy color hosers, and they didn't really ease up on the hosing until Mercadian Masques. It's understandable why it stuck for so long. It wasn't fun to see your entire army returned to hand with Hibernation... but it was crucial to the tournament metagame to have answers to dedicated decks. We just make better answer cards now instead of "Kill all Green decks."

Anyhow, if we assume that Gloom and Flashfires is the norm, then I'd also assume that casual Sleight of Minds and Magical Hacks would become standard as well. Enough so they could stop being very narrow 1 casting cost spells, and pop up with other abilities, and enough so that they'd end up keyworded and in common.

I also gave hack the ability to protect itself against protection. That's kind of weird. But I figured something would have to be done, since the most common target for blue hack would be on a creature with protection from a color. Silly to have an answer that you can't use.

I think they'd just solve it in comp rules. After all, original Protection from White didn't cause itself to fall off, that's just silly.

I know White Ward had errata. But, interestingly, they never spelled out that it didn't destroy itself until the Fifth edition of the card. :p

Reminder text, however, is just a reminder. I could see them pulling the 'doesn't destroy itself' from blue hack printed on rares for space reasons. But it's needed at the common level.