Memory Drain

The counterspell-plus-selection template is one blue has returned to again and again: the extra mana over a hard counter buys a rider that smooths the draws that follow. Here the rider is Scry 2, and the pairing does something a counter that draws a card, like Dismiss, does not. It sculpts your next few draws without locking you into whatever card would have been stapled to the counter, so you can bury a flooded land or dig toward the answer you actually need rather than banking a fixed card. That distinction matters because the two halves pay off on different clocks. The counter is immediate; the sculpting is deferred, worth more the later you fire the spell, since a scry means the most when you already know what you are digging past. The pricing follows a familiar curve. A hard counter sits at two mana, and every point of card advantage or selection stapled to it has historically pushed the total higher; four mana for counter-with-scry lands squarely in the middle band, where the spell is a reactive tempo play that still contributes once the game grinds long. It is a workmanlike member of the lineage rather than a definitive one: the numbers are honest, the effect is clean, and the design leans on Scry to justify the tax the extra two mana would otherwise represent.