Prohibit

Kicker turned the scaling counterspell into a single card you could run early and never feel ashamed of late. Cast for two, it answers exactly the cheap accelerants and one-drops that flood the opening turns; pay the additional two, and the window widens to catch the midrange threats an early-game answer would otherwise miss. That is the design problem it solves: a hard counter pinned to a low mana value is dead weight by the midgame, but a flexible counter that always charges full price is too expensive to deploy at tempo. By tying the threshold to whether you kicked it, the card hands the decision to the caster, who pays only for the range the moment actually demands. A fixed-threshold counter like Spell Pierce draws its line and leaves it there; this one moves the line on demand. The cost is precision: even kicked, it tops out catching spells of mana value four or less, so the genuinely expensive threats sail through, and against an empty hand you are holding an answer that wants something cheap to eat. It is the counterspell as graduated response, charging by the difficulty of the answer rather than asking one flat rate for everything.