Steel Sabotage

The cleanest expression of an old tension in artifact-heavy environments: how do you answer a permanent that has already resolved without paying full retail to do it? The modal split solves both halves with one card. Held up against an opponent setting up an artifact-based engine, it counters the spell outright. Drawn a turn late, after the threat is already on the battlefield, it bounces the thing instead, buying a tempo turn and forcing the recast. The bounce mode is the one that ages well: counterspells go dead the moment the window closes, but returning a resolved artifact to hand is a relevant line as long as artifacts exist on the board, which lets a single blue card stay live across phases of a game where a hard counter would rot in hand. The cost is the whole pitch. At a single blue mana, it is cheap enough to hold open alongside almost anything, and it asks almost nothing of a deck beyond a metagame full of artifacts worth answering. That narrowness is also the ceiling: it does nothing against a board with no artifacts, which is precisely the design bargain a one-mana split-mode answer is built to make. It belongs to the long line of color-pie hosers that blue gets for artifacts, pitched at the rate where the answer is meant to be a reflex, not a commitment.