Filter Out

Blue rarely gets to touch the board this comprehensively, and when it does the effect is usually a symmetrical bounce of everything, creatures included. This one carves out the exception: it sweeps artifacts, enchantments, planeswalkers, and every other noncreature, nonland permanent while leaving the creatures where they stand. That selective sweep is the whole design argument. A caster with a developed board of bodies and few incidental permanents pays a soft price to unwind an opponent's mana rocks, artifact engines, enchantment locks, and planeswalkers all at once, resetting the parts of the game creatures cannot answer. It reads as a reset button, but it functions closer to a targeted disarmament of the permanent types blue has always been weakest against on the ground. The catch is that a hand of bounced permanents is not a destroyed one: everything comes back, and because most of those permanents recast at sorcery speed, the tempo it buys is a one-turn tax rather than a lasting removal, real but rented rather than owned. It works best as a stack-based blowout, held until an opponent has committed the most mana into noncreature permanents, then cast at the end of their turn to strand a fistful of recast costs they cannot pay until their own main phase. Blue's answer to a wide, permanent-based problem has usually been a counterspell one card at a time; this is the color asking what a single-shot solution to all of them at once would cost.