For those of you who are all wondering : Card is
because my intended theme for the card was affecting the elemental's perception of time rather than their physical ability to play cards (
) - by 'hesitating' the players' reaction times are slowed (cards cost more to play), while the upped let's you 'deny' an opponent to slow down the cards they play.
As everyone is talking about the upped, I feel as though there would be no use for the unupped. Even Pandemonium can at least be combined with voodoo doll, and has a cost reduction.
What about making it so the one of the version increases the cost of abilities on your opponent's field?
The unupped actually affects you as well to compensate for the potential lockdown capability. Increasing ability cost would be much less useful IMHO because ability-reliant decks should still be able to compensate with enough quanta production unless it's a deck like SoR Steam Machines or it is solely reliant on mark.
However 2 out before any opposing pillars would be OP. That needs to be prevented or made very very rare.
Should be already rather rare - you need 4 Time Tower/Novae and two of these, which only leaves 1 card-room for error. To minimize this error you would need to fill your deck with 6 Novae and X Time towers as needed - that's at least 18 cards or greater than half a deck. As willng3 mentioned, many of the best-case scenarios with this card require luck and being able to gain advantage in the early-game - late game Denial is a scratch at best against stockpiled quantum.
Regarding balancing in general, I can always raise the cost by 1 to make the "lockdown hands" less likely (it seems comparable to Silence in terms of hand denial.) I'll put up a poll on it.
