Confiscation Coup

Mind control effects have always paid their cost up front: Control Magic locks in four mana, Mind Control five, and you knew exactly what you were buying. This one folds energy into the equation as a deferred toll. The five mana gets you four energy counters and a target, but actually seizing the permanent demands paying energy equal to its mana value, so the spell self-scales: a token or an Ornithopter costs nothing, a Llanowar Elves costs a single counter, a three-drop is gettable, and a colossal artifact you simply cannot afford unless you have banked energy from elsewhere. That conditional clause is where the whole design turns. Cast in a vacuum, the four counters it produces cover the midrange creatures and modest artifacts you tend to meet, which means it functions as a steal effect with a ceiling: anything at mana value four or less is fair game, and everything above it sits out of reach until you have stored more. The moment the board gets bigger, the energy bank becomes a resource you have to build toward, turning a one-card answer into a payoff for a deck that hoards energy across multiple sources. It is the rare control-changer engineered to live inside an energy economy rather than to be a universal answer you can splash anywhere: a steal spell whose price tag is set by everything you have banked before you ever cast it.