Geist Snatch

The four-mana counterspell that hands you a body for the trade. Most hard counters end the turn as pure tempo: you spend mana, the spell evaporates, and the board stays where it was. This one narrows its scope to creature spells only, then pays back the inefficiency with a 1/1 flier left on the table. The math is the whole exchange. Against a creature deck you spend two mana more than a clean answer would cost, and in return you do not fall a card behind on the battlefield: you blank their threat and add a blocker (or, in the right shell, a flying clock and a body to feed something hungrier). The flying matters more than the size suggests, since a 1/1 that can chip in the air and trade up against other evasive attackers is doing real work for a token that came stapled to a counterspell. The constraint is sharp and unforgiving: it answers nothing but creatures, so a hand clogged with these against a control or combo opponent is holding dead cards. That tradeoff (a worse counter against the field, a better one against the things that attack you) is the design's entire identity, and it places the card squarely in the lineage of conditional counters that try to soften their downside with a rider rather than a discount.