Sorcery - "Counter target spell."

Excuse me?

That's there as a slight synergy to giving this card flash. It won't do anything a lot of the time, but the way I'd suggest thinking about this card is just think of it as having the first 2 modes, and the 3rd mode is a really narrow bonus.

Sorcery speed counterspell is one of the oldest gimmick designs in the book, but here the fact you have stapled it onto as the third mode of otherwise quite functional design makes it (even more) senseless and misleading.

The best sorcery speed counterspell design I could imagine would solely focus on that aspect of the card and also heavily imply its intended function - in flavor and any other way if possible.

Also, as a the chance of that third mode ever being useful is so extremely slim that the design would just be much better off without it. There's basically two different concepts competing inside the card that run in opposition to each other.

Even a sorcery speed counterspell costed at is rather questionable in itself but at least it can act as a carrot for those uber-Johnies, Spike-Johnies, or whatever, as it's in principle "super competitively" costed.

I get the logic behind slapping that kind of effect onto as an optional mode on a charm as it's so hard to utilize, but IMO not only does it make it even more confusing than need be (and it's very, very confusing to begin with) but it also lessens that what would make such a sorcery-speed-counterspell concept lucrative in the first place to its intended, likely very niche, audience.

None of the problems you are listing are problems in my mind, and honestly I see a lot of these things as positives. A lot of the idea behind this set is to be high complexity, and more "confusing." I know there are things Wizard's wouldn't print because it'd confuse a lot of players, but I feel like there are huge areas of design space they won't touch for that reason. I'm trying to explore that design space.

I get that this card isn't for everyone, and it is super niche, but all of that is intentional.

Eh. As I already acknowledge it being niche, that factor doesn't bother me too much. It's the general design that I would consider sub-par that's the issue for me.

If you google "sorcery speed counterspell" (with quotes and all) you can found a lot of discussion about this particular concept.

IMO one of the better sorcery-speed counterspells designs would be something like this: "Put yourself two steps ahead before putting yourself one step behind". I was about to post something similar only to found out that it existed so I didn't bother. I still think that it could be polished further, but the basic premise with the said design idea is that the card is fully functional, while still also including the possibility of being a super-effective, "combo counterspell" given the right circumstances. Worth of note is also how the card seemingly and quite clearly explains itself through its rules text giving the sense of "Oh, so this is why it's a sorcery" or the other way around "Wait, why would I... Oh, it's a sorcery".

So it would not be one of those "Look at me, I'm clever!" designs that can then be... well, "mocked" by other designers as they are quite justified to do so. See "You're not Clever": Part 1 & Part 2. Part 2 contains the classic sorcery speed counterspell concept.

I understand your issues, and however, none of it addresses anything I personally care about.

I'm not anti-criticism, but I have my own goals with card design (or any creative endeavor), and I can't really do anything with criticism that doesn't help me do what I'm trying to do. Personally, I don't care very much if my designs are something "Wizards would print" or something that is easy to understand. I'm also not concerned with being 100% original. I'm quite aware I didn't invent sorcery speed counters, but this one is an actually playable card, and the ability to counter is not irrelevant. There are a lot of good flash enablers that'd be worth running anyways, and this could be worth running anyways just as a Divination. Sometimes things will line up, and there are definitely situations where I'd pay 2 cards and 3 mana to counter a spell. I wouldn't run cards just to do that, but if cards I was going to run anyways let me do it, then I can see it coming up.

Fair enough. So what are your design goals?

I was only talking about the design part of the card. Development would be another hurdle. As the card currently stands at IMO it's too powerful for basically being a Divination+. It's contesting with Mulldrifter which also not-so-coincidentally, is a bit too powerful and likely the most widely played of all the evoke dudes from lorwyn for that very reason. Obviously, this depends what kind of power level in general is looked for. Usually some kind of equivalent to whatever may be the current standard is seen as reasonable - perhaps something that's a bit more toward modern is also common as far as I've seen. For a more quirky, expert set like this that is indented toward the advanced players, having cards that are more along the power level of legacy could be seen as reasonable as well. This is kind of the smell I get from this set, but I'm not sure.

Versatility should be costed very highly - something that some of the Charm designs may make you believe otherwise. Having two "reasonable costed" sides in the card means that the card is almost doubly as useful and should be costed to reflect that.

The reason I might seem more invested here is that I've spent a long time working and looking through various Time Spiral -inspired sets / designs. I also am of the belief that such set might be able to be made within under the constraints of NWO and, well, "good design", since as it stands, usually such sets are (seen): as mechanically hacky and constructed haphazardly from random parts that the creator saw as "cool"_. Those are also the reasons why it's very unlikely that we will see another Future Sight and hence I would be interested in exploring defeating those challenges. After all, while Time Spiral might not have been a financial success, it's likely the most inspirational one for up-coming designers for having the enormous amount of innovative mechanical implications including, but not excluded to, those relating to color pie.

Even if that's impossible, just working with such concepts surely rises the changes of making mistakes and encountering issues already embedded in the common practice conventions, that if successfully identified as such, are opportunities to learn. One doesn't really learn from one's successes.

My goals are to make things I (and possibly others, but that's less of a requirement) would find interesting and fun to play. Part of that is being reasonably balanced (although, I feel like anything that is pushed/competitive on custom mtg websites gets called "busted" even though Wizards makes cards just as strong all the time).

For me, this being about as strong as Mulldrifter is fine.

A lot of this gets into really a really vague philosophical area, but I feel like to some extent the designs themselves are indicative of their own goals. Saying "Sorcery speed counter is bad because it's gimmicky" is probably usually not helpful, because sorcery speed counterspells are obviously meant to be gimmicky. Now if something is particularly overpowered, has templating issues or something like that, there's a good chance that wasn't intentional, so I feel like there's a bit more room for discussion there.

Being gimmicky is pretty bad, so in the case of sorcery speed counterspell, I would see the main issue to fix being to reduce it's "gimmicky levels" and try to make the fact that it's a sorcery speed counterspell a natural, if not even crucial, part of its design. Usually such a design would more likely be reached in a way that it being a sorcery speed counterspell would be happenstance and not the starting point, but it could work out either way in the end.

Here, it being a sorcery speed counterspell is still very gimmicky, if not even more so since now it's a 3 CMC counterspell. It also looks like something that could be described as a "throwaway gag" since it's part of an otherwise functional charm. For that reason it might take even longer for the initial reader to realize the effect's utter uselessness in isolation. Since the first two effects pretty much play in opposition to the third effect IMO they take away from each others' designs. Less is more and so on.

Being at 3 CMC it means that the sorcery speed counter spell effect is so bad that it's a niche to a point where I have a hard time really any player type being excited about it. As I probably indicated earlier, a version that costs can at least inspire people to try to utilize it and also give the concept the focus it deserves. After all, there's some novelty and even potential for some comedy in the concept.

I fundamentally disagree that "gimmicky is bad," and I think that's pretty clear at this point.

Also, about how the effect is "useless," you're just straight up wrong there. There has been /many/ games of magic I've played where I'd pay 2 cards and 3 mana to counter something. It isn't constant or frequent, but it comes up. If one would already be running those cards anyways, then it'd definitely come up sometimes.

Obviously a 3 mana sorcery speed counterspell is bad, in the same way that "5R: target opponent loses 3 life" is bad. But there are still a lot of situations where that would be relevant.

You are taking the card apart, and treating it as multiple cards, and assessing them separately. Viewing this as a 3 CMC sorcery counter is just wrong. It's divination with an upside that won't come up often at all, but will probably be very relevant when it does.