Nullstone Gargoyle

Nine mana for a 4/5 flier puts this past finisher territory and into fortress territory, and the lock it brings is gentler than its price suggests. The load-bearing restriction is that only the first noncreature spell each turn gets countered, not every one: that single qualifier is what separates a recurring tax from a hard prison. An opponent can pay the toll by leading with a throwaway spell, then resolving whatever actually matters, so the Gargoyle never shuts down a turn so much as raises its opening bid. The trigger is also color-blind and automatic, firing regardless of who casts the spell, which means it taxes the controller's own noncreature plays unless they sequence around it. Stapling an evergreen counterspell to a body was always going to cost a fortune, and the design makes the controller live inside the same constraint they impose on the table: every player, including the one who paid nine mana, has to spend their first noncreature spell of each turn as kindling before anything real lands.