Statute of Denial

A four-mana hard counter that bolts a board-state condition onto an effect that usually wants no board at all. Strip the rider and what remains is the unconditional permission spell at its plainest: deny anything, no targeting restriction, no caveat. The wrinkle is the clause that fires only when you already control a blue creature, turning the counter into a counter-plus-loot that smooths a draw and stocks a graveyard. That condition pulls the card away from draw-go control, the home turf of cheap permission, and toward the proactive blue tempo plan: land a flash body or an evasive threat early, then hold up four mana to protect the clock while sifting your hand. The friction is sequencing. The bonus rewards a battlefield most permission decks deliberately keep empty, so the loot arrives only if you committed a creature before you needed to react, and a counterspell held in hand is a turn you did not spend developing. Resolve it with no blue creature down and you have paid four mana for the bare counter alone, a steep rate for the floor. The design pays a premium over the cheapest permission and refunds it as card filtering, but only to decks built to put a blue body on the board first and answer threats second.