Anticognition

The base mode is a familiar tax on the two spell types that matter most: cast this at a creature or planeswalker and its controller either coughs up an extra two mana or watches it die. Like every pay-a-tax counter, it decays as the game goes long, sliding from a hard wall in the early turns to a formality once the opponent has mana to spare. The escalation clause is what keeps the card relevant past that window. Once an opponent's graveyard hits eight cards, the tax vanishes and the spell simply dies, with a scry 2 stapled on to smooth the next draws. The threshold is chosen with care: eight cards in a yard is the natural residue of a grindy, spell-heavy game or a self-mill deck doing its work, which is precisely the class of matchup where a payable two-mana counter would otherwise be too soft to keep. That flips the usual patience penalty on permission spells. Rather than degrade the longer you hold it, this one sharpens, converting from an early hedge into a genuine hard counter for the exact turn a hard counter matters. It is a permission spell with a built-in dial that tightens against the decks filling their own graveyard and stays honestly beatable against the ones that dump their hand fast and never cross the line.