Ichneumon Druid
Punishment magic as a green creature, which is almost a category error: green has historically been the color that hates instants the most and has the fewest tools to punish them. The design solution here is to skip the counterspell entirely and tax the second instant of each turn with a four-damage trigger, framing the card as a soft lock on Counterspell-heavy control rather than an answer to any single spell. That "other than the first" exception is where the real friction lives: it gives the opponent one free instant per turn, which sounds generous until you remember that fair decks routinely want to chain a cantrip into a counter, hold up two pieces of interaction on the same turn, or fire off a second pump or removal spell during combat. Each of those sequences costs four life. The 1/1 body for three mana is the price of admission: this is a hate piece dressed as a creature, and the stat line exists so it dies to the removal a counter-heavy deck is least likely to be running. The card sits among the early experiments in asymmetric stack taxation, an idea that would later show up cleaner and more famous in Eidolon of the Great Revel, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, and Spirit of the Labyrinth. The lineage starts here, in green, with a druid nobody remembers.
