Geistlight Snare

Mana Leak has always been the honest soft counter: two mana up front, a tax that stops mattering the moment your opponent untaps into open lands. This design keeps the tax intact and moves the cost around instead, granting two independent discounts that stack. Control a Spirit and it drops a mana; control an enchantment and it drops another; do both and you are countering with the efficiency of a one-mana spell that still demands three from the caster. Soft counters live and die by how long they stay live, and Mana Leak's problem was always that its floor rose every turn. Here the discount does the opposite work: the deck built to enable it (Spirit tribal flying into an enchantment shell, or an enchantress build fielding a resident Spirit) turns a mid-game dead card into something you can hold up alongside real threats. The two enablers are not chosen at random; they are the two things a tempo-flying or enchantment-based blue deck already wants on the board for other reasons, so the cost reduction taxes nothing you were not already doing. What it asks in return is that you commit to a board state before you get to cast it cheaply. The tax itself was always asymmetric, falling only on the spell's controller; the design's real trick is making the cheap, live version of that counter something a specific archetype earns by playing its normal game.