Jabari's Influence

Theft as punishment, not opportunity. The "cast only after combat" clause is the load-bearing restriction: this is not a flexible Control Magic that can lift the best creature off the table at any moment, it is a reply to the attack you just weathered. Your opponent has to commit a creature to the red zone against you, and only then can you turn it around and keep it, slightly diminished by the -1/-0 counter. That timing window forces a purely reactive posture; you cannot proactively reach into an opponent's board, you have to take the swing first. The color restrictions (nonartifact, nonblack) read as standard mid-90s color-pie fencing, walling white off from the era's better black fatties and from artifact creatures that white was not meant to steal outright. The result costs five mana, demands a specific sequence of events, and still leaves you a turn behind on tempo for having absorbed the hit. This is the overcorrected school of Mirage-era white control, where permanent theft or removal was priced in rigid conditions rather than mana alone, the design assumption being that any effect this strong needed a leash longer than its cost. The counter is almost an afterthought: a small nerf to the stolen body, a reminder that even when white gets to keep something, it keeps it diminished.