Lose Focus

Mana Leak has always suffered the same slow bleed: as the game wears on, that tax becomes pocket change, and a soft counter degrades into a dead card. Grafting replicate onto that shell answers exactly the decay. Each additional you sink at cast time buys another copy, and each copy carries its own tax the opponent must satisfy independently. Against a single expensive spell, replicating once puts two spells on the stack, the original and one copy, stacking two separate demands for a total tax of ; pay more blue and the tax climbs from there. Against a turn where the opponent tries to resolve several threats at once, the copies split across targets and turn one counterspell into a multi-spell answer. The scaling is what reframes this from a rate-locked early-game trick into something that stays live late, when a lone tax would be laughable. The catch lives in the mana: replicate is paid up front, at cast, so you commit the extra blue before you see how the opponent responds, and a fully loaded cast can eat your whole turn's mana. That front-loaded commitment is the price for a soft counter that refuses to fall off the way its ancestors did, one built to scale with the game instead of against it.