Saruman's Trickery

Counterspells that leave something behind are an old idea, but the usual method staples a full creature onto the mana cost and asks you to overpay for a turn of tempo in one card. This one takes a quieter route. It sits at the Cancel rate rather than the tighter cost of Counterspell, and it spends that extra mana not on a stapled body but on the thinnest possible increment of development: Amass Orcs 1. That is a rider, not a second spell, one counter that either grows an Army you already field or spins up a 0/0 token surviving only because the counter arrives with it. The design logic is that Amass compounds. One trigger is a rounding error; four across a game is a real clock assembled out of spells you were already casting on the opponent's turn, at instant speed, without ever committing a permanent that does nothing but sit there. That reframes the counter from a purely reactive trade into a slow-burn threat, a meaningful axis shift for a permission shell that historically wins by attrition and then struggles to close. Permission decks have always faced the same problem: how to turn "I said no" into pressure without diluting the "no." Here the pressure is cumulative, tacked onto the answer for a single extra mana, so long as you keep finding spells worth countering.