Induce Paranoia

A counterspell that pays you back in graveyard pressure, built for the era when blue-black control ground games down through attrition rather than racing them. The design idea worth dwelling on is the conditional black payment: the cost prints as a flat four mana of mostly blue, but if any black appeared among the mana you spent, the spell you negate fuels a mill clock scaled to how greedy your opponent was being. Counter a six-drop and you cut six off the top of their library; counter a two-drop and the rider barely registers. The bigger the spell you answer, the deeper the cut, which folds two strategies that usually pull against each other (tempo denial and milling the opponent toward an empty library) into a single instant. That makes it less a generic answer and more a payoff for a deck already trying to deck the opponent out: every counter advances the secondary win condition instead of merely buying time. The price of that elegance is the rate. Four mana for a counterspell asks a lot even before you go looking for black sources, and the mill payout depends on countering spells expensive enough to make X meaningful. It wants both colors and a clear plan, the build-around premise that the control-mill decks of its lineage were assembled around.