A very weakened counterbalance on a stick. Main differences: "noncreature" clause, and you mill the revealed card instead of leaving it on top. I'm debating about removing the "noncreature" clause and changing the counterbalance ability into an activated ability (complete with a mana cost), but that's up to development testing and initial reception.

So the story for this set is going to be a sort of mish-mash of the four classic Chinese novels - Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Outlaws of the Marsh, and Dream of the Red Chamber. It's going to follow a group of four main characters that are roughly going to be combined analogues of the main characters (or villains, since Outlaws of the Marsh has a trouble of heroes and is fairly difficult to represent each one individually). In this case, this character is a combination of Tang Sheng from Journey to the West and Zhuge Liang from Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

For his card, I wanted a card that represented Zhuge Liang (also called Kongming, who already has a card in MTG's Three Kingdoms set Kongming, "Sleeping Dragon"); someone who is peerless for his strategy that at times relied on mysticism and knowing his own enemy and how they regarded him. So I settled on a Counterbalance variant, which I feel is unique and interesting enough to warrant Mythic rarity as well as reward good planning and top-of-library manipulation, deckbuilding, and knowing your opponent's deck (though in most cases it'll just be random at best).

The other main character "combinations" I have planned are:

­/ Sun Wukong (Journey to the West) + Guan Yu (Romance of the Three Kingdoms)

­// Cao Cao (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) + Four Treacherous Ministers (Outlaws of the Marsh)

­/ Zhu Bajie (Journey to the West) + Jia Baoyu (Dream of the Red Chamber)

­// Sha Wujin (Journey to the West) + Lin Daiyu (Dream of the Red Chamber)

Not that any of you guys care about this stuff, but I'm just noting this down for my own reference later.