Invasive Surgery
A one-mana counter with a Surgical Extraction stapled to its back half. The floor is a Negate that only catches sorceries, a deliberately narrow window: it ignores creatures, instants, and the activated abilities that often carry combo decks. But turn on delirium and the counter stops being reactive tempo and becomes a name-stripping tool, exiling every copy of the countered spell from hand, library, and graveyard before the controller shuffles. That second clause is the entire reason to run this over a cleaner counterspell. Against a deck leaning on a single load-bearing sorcery (a tutor-fetched bomb, a recurring sweeper, a critical-mass ramp piece), countering one copy buys a turn; exiling all of them closes that line permanently. The design tension is that the payoff and the enabler pull in opposite directions. Delirium wants a varied graveyard, but a hard counter is a card you hold with mana open, not something that stocks your own bin while it waits. Earning the upgrade means the deck around it has to do the feeding (cracked fetches, cycled cards, a spent artifact or creature in the yard) so four card types are already live when the relevant sorcery hits the stack. It rewards a player who knows precisely which sorcery in an opponent's deck is irreplaceable, because the Negate mode is generic and the Extraction mode is the only thing that makes this a distinct card.
