Cancel

The unglamorous middle child of hard counters: too expensive to compete with Counterspell's clean double-blue, and too unconditional to justify a discount the way conditional counters do when they name what they cannot hit. This is the rate Wizards settled on as the "fair" generic counter once Counterspell stopped showing up in core sets, and that positioning is the whole reason it exists. Counterspell answers anything for two mana, which is too good for the power level most environments are built to support; this trades a generic mana for that cleanliness, which sounds trivial but moves the card out of the first interactive window on the play and forces the holder to keep three mana open instead of two. The extra mana is the tax that keeps an unconditional answer honest in an environment that cannot afford the original. Every counter printed since has been measured against this baseline: Dissolve added a scry on top, the cheaper conditional counters justify their discount by carving out what they refuse to stop, and the modal counters buy flexibility with the same kind of upcharge. None of them altered the core math, which is that a no-strings counter priced one mana above Counterspell is the floor a designer reaches for when they want blue to interact without dominating.