The flavour text makes me giggle irrepressibly.

Going by how the contraption stuff was written, I am probably allowed to make that out-right rules text, hinting that feet may become a mechanic later :)

But no, let's stay semi-sensible. Edit: Or even as reminder text!

So does this translate to "Cards in players hands are treated as though they didn't exist"?

With "treated as though" you can pretty much set up any scenario you want, so some designers see it as a sign of bad design since it's such a hack as far as the rules goes.

This isn't a very serious set, for the most part. The card is mostly intended to make you giggle.

One obvious reading is pretty much "Players cannot cast, reveal, play, discard, etc. cards in hands".

Another would be "Hand size is zero, and if you would put a card in your hand, discard it instead"

Another, probably more fun one, would be that the cards are unaffected - but anything that explicitly tries to access the hand fails.

But mainly the giggles.

Well, yeah, but I think "treated as though didn't exist" does really work since Phasing is a thing :P You could have it as a reminder text though it might lessen the "comedic effect" of the flavor text since they wouldn't be so closely together.

> 702.25b If a permanent phases out, its status changes to “phased out.” Except for rules and effects that specifically mention phased-out permanents, a phased-out permanent is treated as though it does not exist. It can’t affect or be affected by anything else in the game. A permanent that phases out is removed from combat.

Huh, yeah, if you think of this as phasing it probably does work fine.

And is really strong too, if they haven't played a creature by turn 2 then they just lose, no-one can cast anything again.

Oh; I think I remember where this weas intended to be. It's actually intended to effectively just be "All players have hand size 0" - and it's a cost 2 artifact as a mirror to Howling Mine. "Players discard one card a turn" rather than "Players draw one card a turn".

Then the wording turned from "Hand size zero" to the much simpler (albeit confusing and alpha-style) "no hand", flavour text and thus type and name followed naturally.

So less weird rules than I had thought.

Ah! OK, still pretty strong but less ridiculous. That sounds familiar actually, maybe it had that text at some point and I forgot.

Although the "no cards in hand" version was v interesting rules-wise, I'd like to see a more reasonable card using that technique too :)

Heh, that sounds a lot more reasonable. I think the "treated as though doesn't exist" only exists to hold the game together for phasing to work yet it's also loophole that can be used to create absurd cards.

Nonexistence
Instant (M)
Target card, permanent, or spell is no longer. (It can be any card in any zone. For the rest of the game, it's treated as though it didn't exist.)

This wouldn't trigger "dies" or "leaves the battlefield" triggers btw.