The worst thing that can happen with this deck is that we let our opponent establish control of the board early and have to play catch-up for the rest of the game. Usually, this deck DOES NOT want to chase the game and start spending resources just to stay even with our opponent. If we can gain a significant resource advantage or board advantage (or even maintain a neutral board) by Turn 4, that's a huge advantage to this deck. Counters will control the early game so we can get our tempo cards on the battlefield and grind out a win. For this reason,
Spell Snare and
Logic Knot are great cards for this deck. With the wide range of powerful 2-drops in modern, Snare is a critical part of this deck. Especially on the draw, this gives us a play on the opponent's T2 when we only have one mana up, helping us keep tempo when we're already at a tempo disadvantage by virtue of playing second. Having three copies of
Logic Knot is probably the most contentious choice from this group of cards because we run the risk of not having enough cards in the graveyard to delve for and make Logic Knot a hard counter -- and even if we do have enough cards, it often forces us to exile potential targets for
Snapcaster Mage. However, when playing this deck, this has only been an issue maybe one or two times, and I'm willing to accept that for three copies of a card that's a better late game draw than
Mana Leak, and can hit more cards than
Negate, and is a hard counter, unlike
Remand. If the opponent is playing aggro, combo, or mid-range, they're usually willing to tap out or spend most of their mana to play their cards, and we can hard counter by exiling just a couple fetch lands from the graveyard or paying extra mana. If we're in a control matchup, we're likely not countering many spells early and have built up a big enough graveyard by the mid game or late game that Logic Knot is still a strong answer.
Additionally, we have four
Serum Visions for card draw and to set up future draws and three
Cryptic Command, which is my favorite card in all of magic. Cryptic is just a force once we have the mana available for it, and the option for extra card draw is huge. For a deck that's mostly blue, card draw is the one thing this deck tends to lack, so having Cryptic Command and Electrolyze replace themselves is a significant benefit from both cards.
