Ixidor's Will

A counterspell whose tax is pinned to the wrong variable. The clause scales off every Wizard in play, both yours and your opponent's, which produces a price that swings wildly with a board state you do not fully control. The deeper problem is incentive: the tax sharpens exactly when you would rather be deploying creatures than holding mana to protect them. In an aggressive Wizard deck the card asks you to keep three mana open to defend a position you would rather be expanding, and against an empty opposing board with no Wizards anywhere it collapses to a hard zero, letting the spell resolve for free. The tribal subtheme of its era leaned into this kind of creature-count payoff deliberately, building cards that reward a wide tribe, but a counterspell is the one effect that wants to fire early, before the board has filled out. Compare Mana Leak, which taxed a flat three regardless of context and saw years of constructed play; the cost here can balloon past anything an opponent can reasonably pay or vanish entirely, with no reliable middle a deck can plan around. It survives as a tribal curio: a soft counter whose reliability arrives only in a board state you rarely have on the turn you most want to hold up interaction.