Finish the Card Game

{Results}
Winner Idea

{Spoiler}I think I see where this card wants to go. It's a universal "get rid of everything on the stack and no one can say otherwise" card. My first instinct looking at it, is this is a Cancel with a lot of strong upgrades. A counter that can't be counter and counters multiple things, not only having the last word but indeed disrupting a whole chain a player may have invested a lot of resources into without even putting all their eggs in one basket. Oh and it also affects abilities, not just spells. From that alone seems too cheap, as each one of those could easily add to the cost (though I guess you could maybe see it with the bundle discount of ). The bigger issue, however, is the force-of-will-esque "cast this for free" effect. Force of will is often thought of as a gold standard for counters for the simple reason that the ability to cast it without paying mana is invaluable in situations that can make or break the game, namely while pulling off a combo. If one one hand your card is less compatible with certain combos, on the other it's arguably easier to cast than force of will, as it doesn't require another card in hand. Further, cards with the deadly bargain mechanic all become effectively just plain free to cast after the first one, as none will cost any life or mana anymore. So contrary to my initial instincts, a card like this couldn't be fixed by adding more mana, as its biggest issues skips whatever mana cost it has. A condition of some form, or alternate cost that's a little less universally possible to pull off would likely be needed.

As a minor sidenote, I do believe a better wording might be "You may cast this spell without paying its mana cost. If you do, your life total becomes 1.".

The flavor feels like it has fun implications though I'm sorry to say they are going over my head.

{Spoiler}Balance-wise it seems inline with suspend with a cost of more for what would generally be considered a slight benefit. It's an interesting case of milling in that if you're willing to temporarily give up a creature you could self-mill (or if you try to save it, you end up self-milling), but it could also act as a mill-deck's removal option.

What cruel flavor though

{Spoiler}The card feels like a reference to something, but I'm not sure what. After looking around, I realized contrary to my initial impressions that 2 mana even colored make sense putting two +1/+1 counters even with no other effect. The power of searching for a specific type is always a bit nebulous (though there are cases, like dragons, were it's a bit more straightforward), but a cursory look through current scouts do show a number of useful abilities you might want to fetch them for, namely ramping.

{Spoiler}I'll give this win to viriss for a card I felt was both balanced and a bit more interesting than melono's , but melono gets the runner up spot for a still interesting and balanced card.