Ertai's Scorn

The counterspell that punishes the deck built to beat counterspells. The default price is a hard three mana, worse than the plain Counterspell it descends from, but the discount reads the table: against a deck flooding the turn with cheap spells (storm shells, cascade-and-chain builds, spellslinger decks that empty a hand on one turn), the counter drops to two and lands right when those decks want to be tapped out and unchallenged. The discount is asymmetric on purpose. It does nothing against a control mirror trading one spell for one spell, and everything against the exact opponent whose game plan is volume. That makes it a conditional answer rather than a universal one: a full-price safety valve in a fair matchup, a bargain hard counter in the matchups where a two-mana unconditional counter would otherwise be back-breaking. The design encodes a specific piece of metagame policing into the mana cost itself, so the card gets cheaper precisely as the opponent's turn gets more dangerous.