Source

Esper Watermark original design by thespinnity@reddit.com

This is one of those cards where I start wondering just how much obfuscation there is for players to go through here to essentially get that this card just ends up being "Counter target spell" most of the time (ie. Cancel). It 'nontargets' each spell you don't control and then does something on a certain condition if each of those spells' controllers doesn't do something. It even has Arcane just to confuse new players slightly more.

'Countering spells' itself is a concept that many players get confused about in multiple ways, especially in how they relate to handling permanent(spell)s. Negate it seems is much easier get. 'Creatures as spells' as an idea has been forgotten in most other ways ever since they no longer were "Summon Creatures". Maybe it would indeed make more sense for Essence Scatter to say "Counter/Destroy/Bury target creature spell as it's being cast" or something. I guess False Summoning kind of tried that :S

EDIT: I actually see that in Lunar Force (NNNWO coreset) I focused on this point quite well.

Aaaaanyway, certainly there's a place for stuff like this, but I don't feel common is that appropriate. I mean, maybe the complexity and red-flag count is low enough elsewhere at common in the set, so okay, but in general this seems clunky at that rarity.

Are you telling me that Mana Leak is just Cancel? And that Flusterstorm is just Disrupt without card draw?

Arcane is only confusing in that weird parallel dimension you live in where instants and sorceries don't usually have subtypes.

What I'm saying is that Counterspell is what Mana Leak amounts to in most cases. What the card 'aspires' to do is the focus. "What I would be trying to do with this card if I were to include it in my deck?"

> Arcane is only confusing in that weird parallel dimension you live in where instants and sorceries don't usually have subtypes.

­:D Well yeah, subtypes in noncreature/nonplaneswalker could raise questions of whether they have some embedded functionality, more so than with creature equivalents partly, I speculate, because they don't describe the card as an entity so clearly than a 'Goblin' would for a creature card. Okay, 'fire' or 'lightning' could, but 'Arcane' not so much. The level of abstraction is too high. Even with a 'fire' Instant it would be more akin to having a creature with subtypes 'Humanoid Mammal'. I don't think it's self-evident why an Instant has the subtype 'Arcane', especially when compared to a Creature having the subtype of 'Elf'.