Jaded Response

A counterspell with a board-state condition rather than a mana floor: it costs the same two mana whether it works or not, but it only fires if you already control a creature that matches the color of the spell you are trying to stop. That makes it a creature-deck's counter, written for the tempo-aggressive blue build that wants to deploy a threat and then protect the race, not the dedicated control shell that would rather hold up an unconditional answer. The wrinkle is the color-matching clause: against a mono-red opponent your blue body does nothing, while against a fellow blue deck a single Island-tapping wizard turns this into a hard counter on their spells. It rewards multicolor boards and abandons you the moment your creatures all die, which is precisely when a control player would most want a counter and an aggressive player least cares. This is the counterspell expression of a gold-and-enemy-color design philosophy: efficiency handed to the player who has already committed bodies to the table, denied to the one sitting back on cards. The contrast with a flat answer like Counterspell or Mana Leak is the entire point. Those ask nothing of your board; this trades reliability for a fixed cost that never scales up, betting that a creature deck's battlefield is collateral it was going to spend anyway.