Pointed Discussion

One of my favorite bounce spells. Kills token decks completely, hurts elf/weenie decks, and can be splashed pretty easily. I usually prefer this to Boomerang. Great card. 5/5

Oh wow, this is going to give the token generating queen a run for her money

There weren't many banes to the Elspeth deck in Tezz's,
But this was the biggest.
Having your soldier token army ready to destroy everything is great till they're bounced from existence.

This card is flat out ridicules. and only for 2 mana!!!!!!

WOG for tokens, lol

To great to leave a stupid comment at 5/5

What does this do to face-down creatures? Does it return them all? Or just the one targeted creature?

out of all the cards in the cycle, this is the only one that has the potential to effect cards that it can't target. If you can find a way to make a land stop being a land, you could bounce its same named land partners.

Ok this card definitely rocks the casbah, but I am trying to see how it could be updated for inclusion in modern play. By updated, I mean better-balanced.

It isn't just token-hating that makes this card rock (although the ability to destroy mass tokens should be uncommon at least). Most competitive deckbuilders these days run four-ofs as a general rule, so it is quite common to see two or more of the same creature/artifact/enchantment on the battlefield. This makes the card a 'two for one' tempo disruptor on a fairly regular basis, and compared to cards like Disperse, that is probably too good.

Granted, the card can have the negative side effect of making you bounce your own creatures in some rare scenarios, but that isn't really worth taking into consideration as a cost-cutting drawback -more like just an interesting quirk of the card that will show up from time to time.

First thought is that the card should be uncommon, and the mana cost should be raised to . I thought about (2 cmc) but it would still be too easy to use, considering it means almost certain death to token decks (like Eldrazi tokens in standard). at sorcery speed could work, but it would be abandoning one of the trademarks of bounce (and tempo disruption in general): doing it in the opponent's turn. It would turn the card into more of a niche token-hater that isn't splashable, which would be something of a loss I feel.

What if you could bring back the card as is, but make it rare? Bounce feels a little flimsy at rare level though. What do you think?

Another option is to make a rare creature that costs 5+ CMC and has an Echoing Truth-style ETB ability.
Could be cool flavour too... like a 'master' version of AEther Adept ^_^
I particularly like this approach, because the idea mentioned before would probably discourage most people from using an Echoing Truth-style card over Disperse. However, if it came with a powerful creature attached then people would want to use it.

I don't think you would want to make a new version of this card with a different name if you could avoid it, because then it would be possible to have 8 copies of the effect in your deck. That might not be as bad as I fear it would be, though -I don't know alot about eternal formats.

If you are wondering why I have rambled on so much about this, its because I really, really want to use something like Echoing Truth in a standard/extended deck. I love cards that do what I call 'four-copy hate', that is, they hate on players who just resort to the boring old 'play four copies of every powerful card you can fit in' approach.

@Stray_Dog all but one eldrazi spawn token is immune to this spell because the targeted one can be sacrificed in response and cause the spell to fizzle

Non-Creature blue cards that are rated higher than this:
Tinker,
Counterspell,
Ancestral Recall and,
Time Walk
This card is rated higher than MANA DRAIN!!!!!!!! Madness.

i've seen somebody who played a relentless rats deck. I went out of my way to play them with four of these in my deck.
They had ten rats out.
Then they had no rats out.
and then they rage quit ;D

@blink182zombies: Actually, this printing of Echoing Truth is currently rated higher than both Counterspell and Ancestral Recall

Unarguably the best bounce spell in Magic.

Pointing this at a face down morph creature just bounces the targeted one, since face down morphs have no name, thus no card has the same name as them.

A perfect package of flavor, power, and art. 5/5

Can't believe that no one has mentioned Squadron Hawk yet...

Also combine with Warped Devotion in a {U}{B} deck.

My favorite bounce spell. Probably the best one in the universe. Yep. The whole universe.

Answers anything except lands. I call that flexibility.

Take that, Relentless Rats!

The best bounce spell at the CMC 2 slot. Works great on tokens!

Probably the best bounce spell ever made. Its wide field of application, ease of casting and ability to render an entire strategy worthless in a single card overwhelmingly make up for the increase in cost compared to Unsummon and the inability to target lands a la Boomerang.
You can always find something useful to do with this card.

Combos with Islands

So much more useful than the other "Echoing" spells.

you got a bunch of tokens? 'ECHOING TRUTH!"
they all get returned to their owner's hand, but since they are tokens, they cease to exist. I don't care how big your tokens are, they are GONE!

great bounce spell.... one of the best if not the best for the mana. really solid in a bounce deck.

Blue felt left out by Maelstrom Pulse, so they printed its own special, highly abuseable version of it.

Not much else to say, other than it's going to replace most of the instances of Boomerang I use in my various decks. I'll keep one or two for just-in-case scenarios, but this guy has just stepped up to the prime time.

Quite useful in Tezzeret's deck. Bye bye Solider Tokens!

Still viable in RTR with the advent of proliferate.

This thing just keeps getting better and better.

Mirrorweave

Tee hee.