Censor

A soft counter is a card you have to hold up, and one held too long rots in your hand once the tax stops mattering. The alternate mode is the answer to that decay. Deploy it early and the extra mana it demands lands squarely on a developing curve, when an unspent mana is exactly what an opponent short on lands cannot spare. Wait too long, when paying is trivial and the counter has gone limp, and a single blue turns the dead card into a fresh draw instead. That escape hatch is why this plays so differently from the rigid one-mode soft counters it descends from: it never strands you, so a deck can run more copies without drowning in interaction it cannot cast. The tax is deliberately gentle, a nudge rather than a wall, which means the counter genuinely does fail against one spare mana in the late game; the ability to trade it away is what keeps that from making it a dead topdeck. The design lives in the choice it forces every turn you hold it: counter now and bank the tempo, or convert it and keep your draws live. The friction sits in that decision rather than in the rate, and it is why this style of conditional, escapable counter has aged better than the unconditional taxers it learned from.