Gather Specimens

Most theft effects in blue wait for a creature to exist and then take ownership: Control Magic and its descendants enchant something already on the battlefield, so the victim's enters-the-battlefield triggers have long since fired under their control. This one works a phase earlier in the chain of events. It is a replacement effect that lasts the whole turn, redirecting the entry itself: any creature that would arrive under an opponent's control instead arrives under yours, and it never touches their side at all. That distinction is where the card earns its keep. A creature stolen this way fires its enters-the-battlefield abilities for you, not them, and effects that would have done nothing on an empty board (a reanimation spell with no other target, a mass cheat-into-play turn) get rerouted wholesale. Because it covers the entire turn rather than a single creature on the stack, the right setup is a turn where many bodies are about to land at once: a reanimator's payoff, a token swarm, a single resolved haymaker. The cost is the honest counterweight. Triple-blue at six mana is a hard commitment to one defensive read held up at instant speed, and the read has to be correct: if the opponent declines to put a creature into play that turn, you have spent six mana and a card on a guess that pays nothing. In temperament it sits with the counterspells rather than the removal: an answer that rewrites the destination of an event already in motion rather than killing what arrives.