Don't Make a Sound

Quench established the two-mana soft counter: tax the opponent , and accept that anyone with mana untapped just pays and moves on. That has always been the objection to Quench and its cousins. On the turns the tax whiffs, you have spent two mana and a card to do nothing while the threat resolves anyway. This bolts a consolation onto that dead branch. When the opponent pays the and pushes their spell through, the counter converts into card selection: surveil 2 digs toward your next answer or fills a graveyard that wants filling, so the spell is never fully wasted. The design question any conditional counter answers is what it does on the turns it fails to do its job, and the answer here is that it keeps working, just in a different register. Late in a game, when two extra mana is trivial and the counter is worthless, it quietly becomes a two-mana surveil 2 that occasionally taxes, inverting the usual arc where soft counters rot in hand as the game goes long. The friction stays honest, though: it never guarantees the counter, and against a deck flush with mana it is closer to a filtering spell that happens to tax than a piece of interaction you can lean on.