Deprive

Most cheap counters get worse as the game goes long. Mana Leak's tax becomes payable once an opponent has lands to spare; Negate's narrow text leaves it dead against half the cards it might face. Deprive answers the decay problem by moving the price off the mana line entirely: instead of a tax that becomes affordable or a clause that grows irrelevant, the cost is a returned land, a setback the counter itself never softens into a payable escape hatch. That is the structural trade. The counter is permanent in a way few two-mana counters are, but you fund it by skipping a land drop, and the cost of that skip is anything but flat. Bouncing a land while you are still assembling a manabase can cripple a turn; once you have lands to spare, the same return barely registers. So the friction inverts the usual counter curve, biting hardest on the turns you can least afford to fall behind and easing as the game opens up. In the right shell the bounce flips to outright upside: returning a fetchland to crack again, or resetting a land with an enters trigger. The double-blue requirement is real but eases as the manabase fills out. What you buy with all of it is a hard counter built for the grind, one that reads cleanly to anyone counting untapped lands and never goes dead against the wrong half of the stack.