Long River's Pull

Most flexible counterspells load the cost onto you: more mana, a scaling requirement, a life payment, a card off your own hand. This one inverts the arithmetic. Untouched, it is a two-mana Essence Scatter, a narrow answer that only stops creature spells. Promise the gift and it becomes a true hard counter, the full Counterspell effect that stops anything on the stack, and the price for that upgrade is a card handed to your opponent during resolution. The flexibility gets charged in their resource, not yours. That is the transaction the gift keyword is built to model, and counter magic is a clean place to run it: the choice is locked in at cast, so you decide in advance whether the wider net is worth the concession. The wrinkle is where that concession lands in the sequence. The gift draw happens as the spell resolves, before its other effects, which means the opponent only sees the card if your counter actually goes off. Get your counter countered or otherwise fizzle and the promise costs nothing, because the resolution that would have handed over the card never arrives. Against a resolved-you-lose threat (the sweeper, the finisher, the noncreature bomb the creature-only mode cannot touch) the extra card is a real cost, but it is a cost tied to success: you pay it precisely when the counter earns its keep. Reach purchased honestly, one card at a time, rather than smuggled in through a free rider.