Override

Power Sink rewritten into the artifact set's idiom: where that card scaled its tax to whatever the opponent could leave open, this one scales the tax to the board you've already built. Counter the spell unless its controller pays a generic mana for each artifact you control, and the price of escape rises with every mana rock, every equipment, every Ornithopter sitting in play. What makes this a payoff rather than a permission spell is where it starts: with an empty board it does nothing at all, a dead card masquerading as interaction, because the artifacts are the spell. Reliability is not held up at three mana; it is assembled across the early turns. Against a deck that can dump four or five lands and pay through the tax, the counter folds, but in the kind of artifact-dense board state it was printed to reward, the cost climbs out of reach quickly, and unlike a hard counter it asks nothing of the spell's color or type. The price to the caster is identical the turn you have one artifact and the turn you have eight; what changes is whether the opponent can shrug it off. It sits in the family of conditional counters that trade unconditional reliability for a ceiling: nearly useless when behind, close to absolute once the board has tipped your way.