Mindwarper

A counter-as-fuel design from the period when Wizards was first metering repeatable disruption into a creature's own survival. The body is a fiction: it enters as a 0/0 and stays alive only because three +1/+1 counters arrive with it, which means every time you make an opponent discard, you are eating into the creature's own life total. That coupling is the whole point. Hand attack on a stick is dangerous if it is free, so the cost is paid in the Spirit's flesh: three activations, three discards, and the body shrinks to nothing. The sorcery-speed restriction closes the obvious abuse window, keeping it from stripping a card in response to a draw step or end-of-turn play. What you get is a creature that doubles as a finite Mind Rot battery, trading combat presence for repeated information and resource denial until it spends itself out. It is a clean expression of a design instinct that recurs across black's history: disruption should cost something the disruptor cares about, and here the meter is wired directly into whether the thing keeps standing.