Spell Burst

Most counterspells answer a spell by name or type; this one answers it by price. Held at instant speed, X is chosen in response to whatever sits on the stack, so the counter is exact rather than predictive: you wait until a spell is cast, set X to its mana value, and undo it before it resolves. The narrowness is real but quiet, since you are matching a number that already exists rather than betting on one that might. Where Counterspell trades one card for one spell, the buyback clause changes the proposition: pay the extra three and Spell Burst returns to hand as it resolves, so against a deck leaning on a single converted cost (a keystone threat replayed across a curve, a wave of identically priced token-makers) it becomes a recurring wall instead of a one-off. The tension is between specificity and permanence: you surrender the breadth of a blanket answer, and in exchange you can neutralize one cost again and again, provided you keep finding the mana to recast it. That makes it a control player's grind engine more than a tempo trick, because the buyback price only earns out across many casts. And the price never goes away. Buyback puts the card back in your hand, not back on the battlefield, so every use is a full recast: X plus the blue plus the three, paid fresh each time even when you are stopping the same cost twice in one turn. The ceiling is the floor: it can only ever stop a spell whose value equals the X you pay.