Force Void

A soft counter that hands you a card for your trouble, stapling a Mana Leak-style tax to a delayed cantrip. The trade Force Void asks you to accept is a tempo question dressed up as a card-advantage one: the tax only bites when the opponent is tapped low or committing to a key spell, so the counter half is conditional by design, easy to play around once the game opens up. The cantrip is the compensation. Crucially, it draws on the next turn's upkeep rather than on resolution, which means the card you cast it for replaces itself even when the counter whiffs against an opponent who simply pays. That delay is the design discipline: it keeps the floor from being a flat two-for-one and trades immediate card parity for a counterspell that is most reliable early, when one extra mana is the hardest tax to pay. The structure points at a recurring design problem for soft counters, namely that a tax counter loses value as the game lengthens, so the cantrip exists to make casting it on turn three feel acceptable even if it accomplishes nothing but a cycle. It is a measured, era-appropriate take on the counter-and-draw template, built for tempo-leaning blue decks that want to interact early without spending a card to do it.