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Moxonomy

Perplexing Test

Instant3 generic manaBlue manaBlue mana

The modality is the whole trick here: a table full of go-wide decks and a table full of fatty ramp piles want opposite halves of this card, and one instant answers whichever board is the threat. Against a token swarm you clear the chaff without touching the nontoken threats that were built to grind through it; against a fistful of expensive nontoken threats you bounce them all back to hand and force the table to recast, mana they will not have twice. What separates it from a straight Cyclonic Rift or Devastation Tide is the surgical exclusion built into each mode: bouncing all nontoken creatures leaves your token engine intact, and bouncing all tokens leaves your hard-cast board standing. Read as a Fog with teeth, it also works as a combat reset at instant speed, bouncing declared attackers back to hand and forcing the attacker to recommit them next turn. The design belongs to a small family of blue mass-bounce effects that reward asymmetry rather than symmetry, punishing the archetype your own deck is not: the token player casts the nontoken mode, the elemental-and-artifact player casts the token mode, and each walks away with their own board mostly untouched.

Perplexing Test (soc)
SOC · #197rare
Pricing
Normal: $0.19
Foil:
Oracle Text

Rules text

Choose one — • Return all creature tokens to their owners' hands. • Return all nontoken creatures to their owners' hands.
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
N/A
Modern
N/A
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
N/A
Brawl
N/A
Historic
N/A
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
N/A
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
N/A
PreDH
N/A
Pauper Commander
N/A
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
N/A
Penny Dreadful
N/A
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
N/A
TLR
N/A
Printings elsewhere

Other printings

6 sets
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