Reject Imperfection

Counterspells rarely leave a mark on the board. This one does, and the condition that unlocks it is the whole design: counter something cheap, and the spell stops being a clean one-for-one and starts building your permanents. The counter itself is never in doubt (any spell, no clause attached); it is the proliferate that carries the price of admission. Against the early commitments a counterspell most often wants to answer (a mana dork resolving on the wrong turn, a two-drop engine, a three-mana threat), that rider doubles as a proliferate trigger, ticking up planeswalker loyalty, saga chapters, +1/+1 stacks, poison, or anything else already sitting with a counter. That clause reads as an afterthought, but it changes which deck wants the card: a control shell treats it as a hard counter that occasionally throws in extra value, while a counters-matters or proliferate build treats the counter as incidental and the proliferate as the payload. The three-or-less gate is the balancing line. It withholds the bonus exactly when you are answering the expensive, backbreaking spells (the finishers, the seven-drops, the mythic bombs), so the reward scales inversely with the threat's size. You get the value against the small stuff you were happy to trade with anyway, and pay full freight with nothing extra against the things you most needed to stop. That inversion is what keeps the rider honest: the payload attaches to the answers you least needed help making, and vanishes on the ones you did.