Scatter Ray

The narrow tax counterspell has a long lineage: Remand trades a card for tempo, Mana Leak stops early spells cold before the game's mana ramps past four, and this sits in the same family but volunteers a further concession. It only touches artifacts and creatures, which means it whiffs entirely on burn, removal, sweepers, and the opposing counterspells that a soft counter most wants to answer on the draw. The trade for that restriction is nothing: the tax stays a flat regardless of the target's cost, and against an artifact-heavy board it is meant to slow the machine rather than dismantle it. The design logic is a metagame lever, a counter that costs two but is only ever worth including when a format's threats are concentrated in two card types. In an open field it is dead weight; against an artifact-and-creatures deck it becomes a clean, cheap answer that holds up alongside a curve. That conditional identity is the whole point. Where Mana Leak asks a format to be young and Remand asks it to be fast, this asks a format to be built out of the right two nouns, and rewards the deckbuilder who already knows the metagame is shaped that way.