Convolute

The Spike family of soft counters bets against the opponent's mana: counter the spell unless they can buy through, so the whole transaction lives in the window where the escape cost is hard to scrape together. Force Spike asks for just one mana and is a turn-one or turn-two tool; the tax here pushes the bet into the midgame, where four floating mana is genuinely a stretch for a player developing their board on curve. That repositioning costs something real. At three mana, this is priced like a hard counter (Cancel sits at exactly the same cost and simply says no), so you are paying the going rate for a counter that comes with a condition attached. The wager is that the condition almost never matters in the turns you actually want to cast it: an opponent untapping to deploy their best spell rarely has the spare four to spend, and you stop it dead for a card. The structural weakness is the one every Spike-line counter carries: it ages badly. Late, when both players have flooded out lands, a tax is a speed bump, and the hard counter you paid hard-counter rates for would still do its job while this one starts to whiff. That is the trade the design accepts: a counter that wins clean in a tempo race, at full counterspell price, with no insurance once the race is over.