Brush Off

Counterspells that discriminate by card type are usually about what they refuse to hit; this one is about the discount when it hits the right thing. Cast at full cost, it is a four-mana hard counter, a rate no deck has willingly paid since the days of Dismiss. Aim it at an instant or sorcery on the stack and it collapses to two mana for the same effect, which is the whole point: this is a counterspell tuned to win the counter war and the interaction battle, not the creature fight. That conditional cost reduction rewards a specific kind of patience. Holding up two mana against a spell-heavy opponent is a real threat; holding it up against a creature deck asks you to overpay or wait for the wrong target. The design draws a clean line down the middle of the card pool: instants and sorceries are cheap to answer, everything else demands the premium. It is a purpose-built answer to the same category of decks it belongs in, a mirror-breaker that folds a Counterspell and a Negate-adjacent tool into one flexible card whose price you set by choosing what it points at.