Charitable Levy

Symmetric taxes rarely stay symmetric, and this one is built to break in the caster's favor twice over. Making every noncreature spell cost more hits both players equally, which is the constraint that pays for the front half: a two-mana enchantment slowing the entire table's instants, sorceries, enchantments, and artifacts is a real drag on spell-based decks. But the collection counter clause quietly converts that tax into a payoff. Every noncreature spell anyone casts, yours included, advances the enchantment toward its own detonation, and the third counter cashes it out for a card and a tapped Plains from your library. What makes the sacrifice work is that it is not a cost you tolerate but the destination the tax was funding all along: the friction exists mostly to buy time until the counters arrive. In a spell-heavy field the enchantment builds toward its trigger fast off the opponent's own casting, so the more the tax hurts them, the sooner you get paid. In a creature-dense field it lingers longer as a soft tax, still eventually ticking over on your own spells. The friction cuts against you as much as anyone until the moment it resolves into ramp and a fresh card, at which point the whole thing was a delayed, symmetric-looking cantrip that landed a land drop. It is a tax stapled to a payoff, with the tax funding the payoff's timer.