Essence Scatter

The split half of Cancel, and the half that does the real lifting. Where a hard counter pays two mana for total coverage and a generic countermagic spell costs three to keep that breadth, this trims the target down to creature spells and trims the cost to match. That narrowing is the whole bargain: in any matchup where the threats arrive on creatures, a two-mana answer that ignores everything else is exactly the rate you want, and the spells you can't hit (burn, removal, planeswalkers) are usually ones a control deck would rather trade differently anyway. It belongs to the family of conditional counters that let blue keep instant-speed interaction cheap by surrendering universality, the same trade Negate makes from the opposite side of the spell type divide. The design holds up because creatures are the most common thing a counter is asked to stop, so the restriction rarely bites when it matters; you are paying for breadth you would not have used. The reactive nature is its own discipline: it does nothing on an empty stack, so it rewards holding mana and reading the curve rather than tapping out, the tax that every counterspell of this shape quietly imposes.