Spectral Interference

The soft-counter lineage has always traded certainty for a discount, and this one narrows the window twice: once by the size of the tax, once by the shape of what it can hit. Where Mana Leak answers anything on the stack and Force Spike taxes only a single mana, this asks the opponent for four while confining itself to artifacts and creatures. The exclusion is doing as much design work as the tax. A two-mana counter that cannot touch a burn spell, a discard spell, or the countermagic aimed back at you is not a generic answer; it is a filter tuned to threats that arrive as bodies and machines. That is precisely the category of spell opponents are least likely to hold open mana for, so the four-mana tax lands hardest exactly where it is pointed. The scaling behaves like every "unless they pay" counter: a wall in the early turns, a speed bump once both players are flush with lands. The color of the restriction decides everything else. Against creature aggro or an artifact engine it is a clean, cheap tempo play; against a spell-slinging deck or a control mirror it is a card you never want in hand. The narrowness is the point. It is a counterspell built to stop the things that end games through combat and card advantage attached to permanents, priced for that job, and honest about the burn and discard it will always let through.