Ertai's Meddling
Counterspells delete; this one borrows. Rather than answering a spell, it scoops the spell off the stack and stashes it as an exiled card with delay counters that tick down on its controller's upkeeps, then resolves it later as a fresh copy. That makes it a counter whose size you choose (X is the number of turns you buy yourself) and a counter that never actually denies the card; the opponent still gets their threat, just on your timetable. The strategic axis is tempo, not card economy. For one blue over X, pull a key removal spell or finisher out of a critical turn, untap, develop, and absorb the spell when its timing no longer matters. It is the proactive cousin of the temporal toolbox Tempest's block leaned on, where time itself was a resource you could borrow against. The friction is built in: X can't be 0, so the spell always costs at least a turn of delay to deploy, and a fizzling original (targets gone, controller changed) can let the copy fall apart on resolution, which is precisely what a defensive caster is angling for. As a piece of Weatherlight-saga characterization, it does Ertai's job in mechanical terms: the meddler who interrupts rather than destroys, betting that a beat of delay reshapes the outcome more cleanly than a blunt denial ever could.
