Lofty Denial

The soft counter with a scaling clause: two mana to tax a spell for one, or four if you happen to have a flier out. That conditional is the entire pitch. Mana Leak reads across the board and starts leaking in the midgame regardless; this trades a worse baseline (paying just is trivially met on turn three and beyond) for a ceiling that a wide-open Daze or Miscalculation can't reach. The tax it imposes when the flying condition is live is steep enough to hold up as a genuine hard answer in the right board state. The tension is that the card asks you to already be executing a plan (flying creatures on the battlefield) to unlock its best mode, which points it squarely at tempo-oriented blue decks built around evasive threats rather than control shells that want unconditional interaction. When the flier is there it functions like a real counterspell; when it isn't, it degrades into a stopgap that buys a turn against an opponent with mana to spare. That split personality marks the departure from the flat soft counters it descends from: most tax counters scale with the game clock, but this one scales with your own development, rewarding the deck that is winning the board for also winning the counter war.