Ice Out

The whole appeal here is the discount clause, and it changes the tempo math of holding up a counter. A hard counter at three mana is the classic Cancel rate, unexciting and priced to be a filler answer. Bargain reprices it: pitch a token, a spent artifact, or a used-up enchantment, and it becomes a two-mana counter paid for with a resource you were often finished with. That is the design tension the card resolves. Counterspells live and die on how cheaply you can leave them up while advancing your own plan, and this one lets a board that generates disposable permanents (Food, Clues, treasure, incidental tokens) convert that clutter into interaction without opening a new mana window. The restriction is real: with nothing to sacrifice, you are back to a plain three-mana Cancel, and the fodder has to already exist at instant speed, so the discount rewards decks built to produce spare permanents rather than decks that merely want a counter. It belongs to a tradition of counterspells that fold an additional cost into the mana rate, the way Daze asks for a land bounce or Force of Negation asks for a card pitch, but bargain aims the cost at the graveyard-and-token economies rather than at your hand or your lands. The counter itself is generic; the sacrifice is the whole reason to run this over the dozens of other three-mana options.