Turn to Frog

The trick most players misread as a temporary downgrade is really an exercise in the layer system. Setting a creature's base power and toughness to 1/1 happens in Layer 7b, which resolves before the anthems, Auras, and +1/+1 counters that live in Layers 7c and 7d, so this does not erase a creature's buffs: a counter-laden or anthem-boosted threat keeps every point of that bonus stacked on top of the new 1/1 base. What it does erase is everything in the abilities layer. Strip a creature of all abilities and it loses its evasion, its activated and triggered text, and the keywords that were making it matter, leaving a vanilla blue Frog until cleanup. That reversion is the leash, so this is a tempo and combat instrument, not a permanent answer. The window is where it earns its mana. An ability that has already resolved onto the stack will play out regardless, since those triggers and activations no longer depend on their source; this counters nothing in flight. What it does is neuter a key blocker mid-combat, shut off a creature's defensive keywords long enough to push lethal through, or shrink a would-be attacker into a 1/1 that no longer threatens the race. Note the targeting restriction that bounds it: a blue spell that has to target cannot touch hexproof, shroud, or protection from blue at all. This is neither hard removal nor a pure combat trick but a hybrid, sharpest against expensive, ability-dense creatures and useless against the untargetable ones.