Neutralizing Blast

Counterspells that scope their target down to a subset of the card pool are a trade: you surrender coverage to buy efficiency, and the whole bargain lives or dies on how common the target is. This one bets entirely on gold cards. Against a deck whose threats are multicolored, two mana to answer any of them is a rate no generic hard counter can match. Against a mono-color or mostly-colorless opponent it is a dead card, with nothing in between: the multicolored line is a hard wall, not a soft restriction. That binary is the design's honesty. It refuses to touch Lightning Bolt, refuses to touch a colorless artifact, refuses to answer a single-color bomb, and in exchange asks only the lighter of the two costs a generic counter would demand. The effect belongs to a long line of conditional counters keyed to a single axis of the card pool (counters that only hit creatures, only hit noncreature spells, only hit cards above a certain cost); the wrinkle here is that its axis is one a deckbuilder chooses to lean into rather than one the format hands you. You either know in advance that the opponent's threats are gold, or you do not cast it at all. It is a scalpel by construction, sharpened for a specific kind of opponent and inert against the rest.