My guess is this is a much less powerful card than the original. What made Invisible Stalker so appealing was that you could build an entire game plan around it, pouring resources into it without worrying too much about an opponent interacting with it. Here, all the opponent has to do is pay one extra card to deal with the threat and make all those resources wasted.
Still, "can't be blocked unless you pay" is a fun and rarely-used bit of templating tech to deploy. I suspect it's rarely used because a Propaganda effect for blockers would be unfun to play against-- most decks don't have much else to do with their mana on an opponent's turn, so it's easy for them to be "forced" to waste mana. Discard as a cost, though, seems like a different story.
The second ability might read less ambiguously as "Whenever CARDNAME becomes the target of a spell or ability an opponent controls, counter that spell or ability unless its controller discards a card."
ReplyDeleteIt's a reasonable power level fix for Invisible Stalker but I wonder if this is exciting enough to deserve a place in a set.