Mana Drain

Counterspell already existed when this printed, and the design question Mana Drain answers is the one no card before it had asked: what if the counter paid you back? The refund is structured with surgical precision. The mana arrives at the beginning of your next main phase, not immediately, so you cannot Drain a spell on your opponent's turn and dump the proceeds at instant speed before you untap; the floodgate opens on your own clock, which means the card rewards the player who is already developing a board and punishes the player using it purely reactively. The mana is colorless, which keeps the symmetry honest: you cannot Drain a Cryptic Command and cast another Cryptic Command off the refund without your own blue sources online. And the payoff scales with the opponent's ambition, which is the elegant part. Countering a one-drop is Counterspell plus a refund worth almost nothing; countering a six-drop is Counterspell plus a Dark Ritual aimed at whatever you were already planning to cast. The card taxes the opponent's curve and subsidizes your own in the same motion, which is why it has never been reprinted at common, never been functionally reprinted in any color, and has spent its entire existence on the restricted or banned list of every format old enough to have heard of it. The two-mana counterspell with an upside ceiling no design has been allowed to revisit.