Decree of Silence

Eight mana for a counterspell that does not target is a steep ask, and the design answers it with permanence: once it resolves, every opposing spell hits the wall for free until the third depletion counter falls and the enchantment dies. That is the lock half of a deliberately two-sided card. The other half is the escape hatch built into the cost. When the board is wrong for an eight-mana enchantment, you cycle it for , and the cycling trigger counters a spell on the way to the graveyard while replacing itself in hand. So the same piece of cardboard is either a repeating, untargeted hard lock or a one-shot counter-plus-draw, and you choose which at the moment you spend mana on it. The structural cleverness is specific: the lock counts and bins spells one at a time regardless of order, and the self-imposed three-counter timer turns the permanent into a temporary one before it can simply end the game. Most haymaker enchantments of this weight become dead cards the moment the late game arrives on the wrong axis; this one demotes itself gracefully to a six-mana interaction instead of rotting in hand. Few designs from this era resolved the tension between a top-end bomb and the brick a top-end bomb usually becomes by writing the answer directly into the casting decision.