Evasive Action

A counterspell that measures your own manabase instead of your opponent's resources, and that inversion is the whole idea. In a deck assembling all five basic land types, the opponent has to pay five extra mana to push a spell through, which is a hard counter in everything but name once the game stretches out; in a two-color shell it might tax one, barely a stutter-step. That sliding scale was the design lever a whole cycle of domain spells was built to pull, rewarding the kind of greedy five-color fixing that early multicolor blocks pushed players toward. The deckbuilding price is paid before the card ever reaches your hand: you commit to wedging in every basic land type, a steeper cost than most soft counters ask. Set it against a flat tax like Mana Leak, which always demands three and decays as the game goes long. Evasive Action scales the opposite direction, growing more punishing with every land type you stitch together. It is an artifact of an era when domain was the favored dial for rewarding color commitment, a counter whose ceiling is set by your willingness to bend your mana, not by anything the opponent did.