Out of Air

Counterspells that punish specific spell types are an old idea: Remove Soul stops a creature dead, Dispel and Negate carve out their halves of the stack. What this does instead is keep the flexibility of a hard counter and just make the price move. Point it at any spell and it costs the full four; point it at a creature spell and it drops to two, matching the efficiency of the tightest narrow counters while retaining the option to answer anything at a premium. The design elegance is that the restriction never actually restricts. You are always allowed to counter the burn spell or the planeswalker; you simply pay retail to do it, and the discount rewards you for the matchup where you were most likely to want a cheap answer anyway. That structure resolves an old tension in permission design, where a card had to choose between the versatility of a universal counter and the tempo of a cheap conditional one. Here the mana cost bends around the target rather than the text locking you out of it, so the card scales with the board it faces instead of forcing a guess at deckbuilding time about what you will need to answer. The result is a counter that reads as a two-mana creature check most of the time and quietly widens into a four-mana catch-all against everything else, all without holding two different cards.