Last Thoughts

Cipher's whole pitch was repeatable spellcasting attached to combat, and the cleanest expression of that idea is the most basic effect in blue. Encode this on an attacker and every connection refills your hand, turning a single sorcery into a draw engine that scales with evasion rather than mana. The trade you accept is the same one cipher always demands: the encoded copy is free, but it lives or dies with the creature carrying it, and combat damage to a player is a much harder condition to meet reliably than simply paying four mana again. That gating is what keeps a no-strings draw effect from spiraling. The reward curve points toward unblockable bodies and proliferating evasion, where the encoded creature becomes a faucet that runs every turn it lands a hit. As a mechanic, cipher never found a permanent home, and the card-advantage version of it is the most instructive datapoint: the effect is plainly powerful in the abstract, but the requirement to deal combat damage before the engine fires anchors it to a board state you have to build and protect. It is the design splitting the difference between a one-shot cantrip and a recurring advantage machine, with the creature itself serving as both the delivery system and the single point of failure.