Unyaro Griffin

Color hosers got cheaper and more flexible than this over the years, but the Mirage version of the idea is instructive precisely because it is so hedged. The ability counters only red instants and sorceries, only by sacrificing the Griffin, and only one spell per body. A Pyroclasm or a Lightning Bolt gets stopped; a hasty red creature or a burn-flavored enchantment walks right past. What carries the card when red has nothing worth countering is the evasive body: you keep a 2/2 in the air rather than holding a dead card, which is the entire reason a reactive ability could be welded onto a creature at all in this period. The floor is a working threat, not a blank. Because the counter costs no mana, the Griffin sits on the board as a standing clock rather than a held bluff, and the opponent has to weigh whether a single burn spell is worth more than the creature they would force you to trade away. The 2/2 keeps swinging until that question gets answered. It is an early ancestor of the "creature that is also a conditional answer" template white has returned to many times since, built well before that template got efficient enough to be dangerous, and the design tells you exactly what the era considered a fair price for a counterspell: an entire creature, narrowed to one color and one spell.