This seems absolutely insane to me. You get a tap land that doubles as a free tutor for a Merfolk card without any color commitment. For example, Merrow Harbinger has a very lackluster body just to be able to search for a Merfolk and put it on top of your library.

I think that tutoring ability ought to have an activation cost more akin to one seen in Axgard Armory and in Inventors' Fair, so like ", , Sacrifice ~: ..." It's also prolly worth of note that unlike numerous Equipment and Auras, Merfolk are quite likely to have flash so this can even in some limited cases function as a combat trick of sorts.

These days you can just say "Create a 2/2 red Dwarf creature token." See Advent of the Wurm for example.

That middle ability being able to kill creatures through debuffing is bendy for a monored card.

"During" isn't used much as a word in rules text nowadays. Looking at World at War, I would word that emblem as "After the first postcombat main phase on each of your turns, there's an additional combat phase followed by an additional main phase. At the beginning of that combat, untap all creatures that attacked this turn."

Getting a 2/2 as a +1 ability on a 4 CMC walker seems really good. I would personally switch up the first and second ability. When I check out some existing 4 CMC walkers, it seems they tend to get a 2/2 for their 0-costing loyalty ability, or create a 1/1 for +1 or create a bit larger due for minus loyalty ability; Arlinn Kord, Garruk Relentless, Xenagos, the Reveler, Elspeth, Knight-Errant, Saheeli, the Gifted, and Sorin the Mirthless for example. The only exception to this I can find is Nissa Revane, which seems reasonable given she's of the creature color, you can get only a limited number of those dudes and only if you actually include them in your deck, and she has a rather pitiful starting loyalty of 2.

Well, the whole concept of wraths in white is somewhat iffy. I still think they fit more into black, but at least now black solidly shares it with the color officially. Regardless, that's a color pie discussion.

Then we have stuff like Razia's Purification (Merciless Eviction) which only has one though I guess that could be said to follow the rule of requiring at least two colored mana of which at least one matches the "main" color.

I would go as far as saying that stuff like Frazzle is fine, which many probably see as pushing the envelope or as an one-off exception. I don't find it unbelievable that the official direction would move towards this in the near future as well. For example, I'm perfectly fine with Silences Yet Unmoved that is a card in my set. I know neither of these are strictly hard counters, but they are very close. In my book Cancel is fine.

Ah! I knew there was another card that did that... I just couldn't put my finger on it.

Personally, I'm not a fan of this exception. But I understand that one can only print so many cards with Undermine's casting cost.

The truth is, though, that the double blue exception is a bit of a bogus rule propped up by grandfathered cards that just happen to have UU in their cost. I understand the argument of why only serious blue players should have access to hard counters. It makes sense in the abstract. Until you realize that black gets hard creature removal on spells with only one black mana. Red gets hard burn. Green gets hard artifact destruction, etc.. It's just a rule that we all decided was fine for one color because that's what we've always done.

(Though, I guess white Wraths almost always include double white. I'm sure there are some other mechanics that operate this way, too.)

@jmgariepy:

Ever since Psychic Strike it has been said that hard counterspells are okay as long as they have two or more colored mana in their mana costs, which of at least one is - as opposed to hard counterspells always requiring double in their mana cost.

Interestingly, Ionize infers that might also be an option now.

I mean, "~ deals N damage to up to one target creature" would have worked as well; so would a "Choose one or both"-wording since both effects target (with the benefit that you can just cast it as a really expensive burn spell).

That said this is Dismiss except you know you always draw Shock and in turn have to cast it immediately - without additional cost. That's about the level of upgrade going multicolor should give you.

It is a perfectly servicable design if that exact thing is what you want.

I personally would probably prefer the Mana Leak variant, but those variants are why we won't run out of design space anytime soon.

­Underworld Dreams or half a Psychic Possession. Seems reasonable.

Hm. So it's like Concentrate costing and 6 life... kinda like Jace's Ingenuity with phyrexian mana. Or if you want library manipulation, it's a 2-mana sorcery Brainstorm.

Doesn't seem broken to me.