Stall Out

Three stun counters is the number that turns a tap effect into a tempo sink. Tapping a creature buys you one turn; a single stun counter buys two, since it eats the next untap step. Loading three at once takes an attacker or blocker offline for three full untap cycles, which is closer to soft removal than a combat trick. The counter itself is the elegant part: rather than inventing a new "does not untap" state, it reuses the stun-counter framework, so it interacts cleanly with proliferate and with anything else that reads counters, and it degrades one tick at a time instead of expiring all at once. The ceiling comes from what the card refuses to do: it does not actually kill anything, so the creature stays on the battlefield, remains a legal target for its controller's own untap tricks or sacrifice outlets, and comes back eventually. Cycling pays down that limitation. When the board does not present a target worth freezing for three turns, the sorcery folds into a card, so the slot never sits dead in hand. That combination (a hard tempo lock when you need it, a cantrip when you do not) is the design pattern blue keeps returning to for its cheap, situational answers: give the effect real teeth, then attach an escape hatch so drawing it in the wrong spot is not a punishment.