Hand to Hand
A symmetrical lockdown on the most contested phase of the game, and a rare attempt to legislate combat itself rather than the creatures fighting in it. The premise is that combat tricks and instant-speed removal are what make attacking risky; remove the ability to respond, and the attacker swings with full information. Shutting off nonmana activated abilities goes further than a simple counterspell wall: it freezes the entire interactive layer of the combat step, from regeneration shields to pump activations to flash-in blockers that work off abilities rather than the cast itself. The word "symmetrical" is doing the heavy lifting, and it is also the reason the card has always sat at the margins. Both players lose their combat interaction, so the deck that benefits is the one built to attack first and need nothing back: a board that wins the damage race on raw stats once the tools that punish overextension are switched off. That is a narrow ask, which is why it reads less as a constructed staple and more as a fossil from when Wizards was still probing how much of the rules engine an enchantment could be allowed to switch off. The closest cousins are the cards that turn off blocking or untapping entirely; this one leaves combat physically intact and simply strips out the part where either player gets to talk back.
