Condescend

The X-counterspell solves a structural problem that plagued earlier scaling permission like Mana Leak and Force Spike: late in the game, when the opponent has mana to spare, the counter just fizzles and you have spent a card for nothing. Condescend hedges against exactly that failure. When the counter doesn't land, Scry 2 still fires, letting you reorder the top two cards of your library or bury them toward whatever the game actually demands. That turns a dead spell into a cantrip-adjacent dig, so the floor of the card is "I looked at two cards and smoothed my next draws" rather than "I wasted a turn." The X cost lets it scale from a tempo tax in the early turns to a hard wall in the late game, but the real design lesson is in the rider: a soft counter that pays you regardless of outcome is far more comfortable to maindeck than one that only earns its slot when it connects. Bundling permission with library manipulation, where you spend the floor of your mana to ask a question and keep value whether or not the answer is yes, became a recurring template for blue interaction in the years that followed. The scry is what keeps the counter from ever being a complete blank, and that insurance is the whole reason a tax effect this conditional is worth running at all.