Ghost-Lit Warder

Channel was the keyword built to fix dead draws, and this Spirit applies it to the one effect that suffers most from being stuck in hand a turn too late. A Mana Leak stapled to a body sounds like value, but the body here is almost incidental: a 1/1 that wants four mana untapped and the leisure of a tapped-summoning-sick turn before it can soft-counter anything. The real card is the discard mode, which strips away the creature entirely and lets you pay from your hand to counter unless the opponent finds . That second number matters more than it looks: the cost-to-pay escalates from to when you channel, so cashing in the Spirit buys you a stronger tax than the activated ability ever offers, at the price of a permanent you no longer get to keep. It resolves the perennial control-deck tension of drawing your bodies and your interaction in the wrong order: when you need a creature, you have one; when you need a counter and the board is irrelevant, you have that instead. The friction is that you only get one of the two per copy, and committing the channel mode means accepting you drew a worse Force Spike than you'd have liked at instant speed. A modest card whose interest lies entirely in how channel converts a slow permanent into a flexible spell on demand.