While this card has a very powerful control-effect, it is also highly vulnerable to instants and sorceries (especially red), and demands that you use a large % of blue land to activate it. Perhaps, during revision the card was reconsidered for all of these reasons. A lot of the cards that I've been going over probably tell the same story - Very powerful effects at unmanageable costs. While they can be used by meeting certain conditions, those conditions demand too much attention in the deck design, and these cards have become obsolete. Newer abilities might make this card relevant again, such as "hexproof", which could shield it from your opponent's non-creature spells. All these cards that I am referring to (Disrupting Scepter, Aladdin's Ring, Temporal Adept) contain an ability that is usually reserved for a non-creature spell. The fact that they are permanents gives them a much higher power potential, as they can be used again and again. In a finely-tuned format, they might be viable components to the set, but the prerequisite set-up makes them too awkward to play with, at the moment. |
