Wizard's Retort

A counterspell with a tribal tax-break: control a Wizard when you cast it and the price drops to two mana, matching the unconditional hard counter that defined blue's early control shells. The conditional discount is where the design lives. Mana Leak and its kin bought a clean Counterspell rate up front with a back-half escape clause that decays as the game goes long; this one keeps the unconditional counter and instead prices the Wizard creature type into the equation. The check happens at the moment of casting, not at deckbuilding: you can run this in a Wizard-heavy list and still pay three if every Wizard is dead or was never on the board when you needed the answer. In a deck already built on Wizards the discount arrives almost for free, and the card becomes a Counterspell that costs one less than the baseline; strip the theme out and it dwindles to a slightly clunky three-mana answer. That split is the whole point. The card is either the most efficient hard counter you can run or a marginally overpriced one, with no middle setting, and which version you get is decided board-state by board-state at the instant you hold up mana. Among counterspells that reward tribal density without gating it behind a lord or a creature-type-matters payoff, this is a softer ask: it wants Wizards nearby, but it never stops functioning without them.