Broken Ambitions

A scaling soft counter with a coin-flip stapled on. The permission half is the Mana Leak family taken to its logical extreme: instead of a fixed tax, the caster sets the threshold with their own mana, so the spell scales into the late game the way a flat-tax Force Spike never could. Cast it for a few mana on turn three and you have a modest tax; cast it for eight on turn nine and you have a hard counter against an opponent without an open mana cushion. That flexibility is the design's strongest leg. The weaker leg is clash, the mechanic this design leans on for its upside. Both players reveal the top of their libraries and each independently chooses to keep that card on top or tuck it to the bottom, with the higher mana value winning; the reveal you only half-control decides whether the rider goes off. Crucially, the mill is not a consolation for a failed counter. The four cards come off the spell's controller whenever you win the clash, whether they paid the tax to resolve their spell or let it die. So the two halves answer to different masters: the counter wants raw mana on hand, while the clash wants a fat mana value sitting on top of your deck, a configuration a lean permission build rarely keeps. That contingency is exactly why clash never carried real competitive weight; it swapped the reliability that makes interaction worth running for variance most formats would not pay for.