Biting-Palm Ninja

Ninjutsu spells have always traded a body's evasion for a repeatable payoff, but this one bolts a resource-denial engine onto the deal by way of a self-contained counter economy. The menace counter is doing two jobs at once: while it sits on the creature it is a keyword, granting the evasion the ninjutsu return needs to keep connecting, and the moment you spend it on a connect it converts into a Thoughtseize aimed from the far side of combat. That is the design tension worth admiring. Every connection forces a real choice: keep the menace and stay hard to block, or cash it to strip the best nonland card from a revealed hand and hand back a 3/3 that is now easy to chump. It self-limits to a single strike from any one counter, so it cannot grind a hand to zero on its own, which is exactly what keeps a hand-disruption effect stapled to evasion from being oppressive. The ninjutsu clause is the delivery mechanism that matters: bouncing an already-unblocked attacker back to hand and swapping it in ambushes the damage step, sidestepping the sorcery-speed vulnerability that a hardcast discard creature would face on an empty board. The counter framing turns what could have been a static keyword into a spent resource, and spending it is where the interesting decisions live.