I'm pulling out of the parking lot. We all know what that means. It's time from the drive to work.

And I drop my daughter off at school.

Okay, so today we're going to start of a new series. The series is called Designing Blink,

where what I'm going to do is take basic things that we do, you're just basic effects the magic has,

and talk about how we design for them.

So our first foray into this will be designing counterspells.

So I'm going to talk all about what we need to do to make counterspells.

So first thing we need to do is we need to do some definitional stuff

and talk a little bit about how we define counterspell.

So the first distinction I want to bring up is what we call a soft counter spell and a hard counter spell.

This is a term that R&D uses.

Okay, so a hard counter spell is a counter spell where it just says counter-target spell.

What that means is it counters anything.

It doesn't matter what the spell is.

It doesn't matter what the opponent does.

It's just going to counter the spell.

You have 100% certainty that you are going to be counted in the spell with a spell.

A soft counter means that there's some condition to it that means it won't necessarily counter everything.

It could only counter a certain subset of spells.

It could only counter the...

Sometimes it could counter them

unless the opponent does something.

...