Gandalf of the Secret Fire
Cast an instant or sorcery on an opponent's turn and it does not die into the graveyard: it exiles with three time counters and, if it lacks suspend, gains it, coming back as a free recast three of your upkeeps later. That grant clause is the clever part, because it does the recursion without the spell needing suspend natively, so a defensively cast burn spell or a stray removal spell comes back around on its own clock. This flips the economics of reactive spellcasting. Counterspells, instant-speed burn, disruption held up on their turn: normally these are one-for-ones, resources that leave your hand and never return. Here every reaction fired on an opponent's turn becomes a deferred second copy, cast later with mana already spent. The catch lives in the timing. The counters come off during your upkeep, so the free recast lands on your turn, not theirs. That quietly excludes the reactive spells that only find targets on the opponent's turn (a hard counter rarely has anything to counter on your own upkeep), which pushes the engine toward flexible spells that resolve fine whenever they arrive. The three-counter delay is the balancing tension: value shows up on a timer rather than in the moment, and collecting it means surviving the turns in between. What the design rewards is exactly the posture blue and red already want to adopt, then charging patience as the price of the payoff.
