Calculated Dismissal

The Mana Leak template with a graveyard rider stapled on, and the rider is the entire point of the design. A bare three-mana soft counter had long since fallen out of fashion: Mana Leak itself stopped being a default once formats got fast enough to make "pay " a fee opponents could simply eat. Spell mastery answers that decay problem by paying you a small dividend in the games where the soft counter is at its weakest. Scry 2 is not a swing, but it is card-quality smoothing that a midgame counterspell wants precisely when the counter half is getting outclassed, since a graveyard full of instants and sorceries is exactly the board state of a deck that has been trading and casting cheap interaction for several turns. The condition rewards the deck that was already going to run this card without ever feeling like a hoop. It is a study in how to keep a lapsed effect relevant: take a counterspell whose floor sags as the game develops, and bolt on a clause that gets better along the same curve, so the card scales up at the same rate its primary function scales down.