Voidwalk

The blink is the bait; the cipher is the payload. On its own, the front half is deliberately modest: a four-mana sorcery that exiles a creature and hands it back at the next end step. Aimed at your own board, that resets a tapped attacker, re-triggers an enters-the-battlefield effect, or untangles a creature from a temporary lock; aimed across the table, it shaves a blocker off for a turn. The sorcery-speed clause matters here, and it is exactly why this is not a protection spell: with no instant-speed window, the blink is something you plan around the combat step rather than fire off in response to removal. Cipher reframes the whole transaction by attaching the spell to a creature instead of letting it resolve and disappear. Once encoded, every connection that creature lands recasts the blink for free, turning a one-shot tempo play into a recurring tax on whatever the defender keeps back. The wrinkle is that cipher demands precisely what combat damage already demands: an unblocked attacker. You have to win the attack step twice over, first to land the hit, then to spend the free copy on a target worth flickering. That double dependency is what kept cipher from spiraling as a keyword: the mechanic always lived or died on whether the encoded effect justified connecting. One rule the engine enforces on itself: never aim a copy at the carrier, since blinking it returns a new object and severs the encoding entirely. Point the copies elsewhere and the verb is blink, the most flexible thing blue does, which makes this one of the cleaner vessels cipher ever got.