Mirrorshell Crab

A seven-mana 5/7 that most decks would never cast is exactly the kind of card that lives or dies by its second mode, and this one hides a soft counterspell inside its discard cost. Held in hand, it is two objects at once: a Ward body that taxes whatever tries to remove it, and a two-and-a-blue tax counter that never touches the battlefield. Neither half is remarkable alone; the value is that a single card can be whichever the turn demands. Early, when a seven-drop is dead weight, you pitch it to answer something on the stack; later, when a floating soft counter would rot in your grip, you cast the creature and let the Ward tax the removal that would otherwise pick it off. Both modes speak the same language: "unless that player pays ," a tax rather than a hard denial, so the card only stops an opponent who cannot afford the extra . That same sits on the Ward and on the discarded counter, which is symmetry, not coincidence: the creature protects itself with the exact friction it hands you when you throw it away. Blue has a long tradition of cards that blur their type identity (creature-lands, cantrips that double as removal), but this one splits along the more honest axis of tempo: commit it when you have the mana to close, or discard it when you cannot afford to sit on a counterspell you may never need.