Rakshasa's Disdain

The inverse of the front-loaded soft counter. Where Mana Leak demands its tax the moment it lands and decays into a Force Spike as the game goes long, this one runs the curve backward: cast on an empty graveyard it taxes for nothing at all, a Force Spike only once a single card sits in the bin, and it hardens from there as every additional card adds another point to the price. That back-loading ties the spell to a very particular clock. Early, it counters almost nothing and reads as a dead card; the payoff arrives only after a self-mill engine, a fetch-heavy manabase, or an aggressive discard outlet has already stocked the yard. The dependency runs one direction, and it cuts against one of blue's most common late-game engines: a delve deck actively exiles cards from its own graveyard to pay for spells, so the more it leans on that mechanic, the smaller the tax this leaves behind. The graveyard here has to be a resource cultivated and left intact, not one strip-mined for cost reduction. That is why it functions as a build-around protection spell rather than a maindeck reflex: it earns its slot in a shell whose whole plan is a fat graveyard it wants to keep, and offers nothing to the deck that empties the bin as fast as it fills it.