Assert Authority

The discount is the whole pitch, but it has a hard stop: affinity erodes only the , never the colored pips, so the floor is exactly and nothing cheaper. In an artifact deck dense enough to matter, that turns a seven-mana counter into a two-mana one that exiles rather than buries. On an empty board it stays at full freight, a price no deck would pay for interaction, however unconditional. That spread between the printed cost and the real cost is the affinity bargain in concentrated form, and it is exactly the part of the mechanic that needed reining in: the card demands you build a board that turns its sticker cost into fiction, then rewards you with an answer that is both permanent and floor-cheap. The exile clause is what ages well. A counter that merely sends a spell to the graveyard can be undone by the recursion engines artifact-dense decks naturally invite; exiling closes that loop. The genuine tension is structural rather than written on the card. The very board that drives the cost down to also makes you the kind of deck that wants to be tapping out and attacking, not holding mana open for interaction. Cast it without artifacts and it is dead weight in your hand; cast it at its floor and you have spent your entire identity earning the right to.