For Challenge # 038 Couldn't resist the name, so had to make them birds; really that's probably too much of a downside even for a green counterspell.

LOL @ flavour text.

Yeah, I quite like the design, although I agree, I don't know how often this would be worth it. Not bad if you have a bunch of fliers/reach, or cheap hurricane effects.

And a lot better with "whenever a creature enters the battlefield" creatures. Yeah, I can see this having a nice niche somewhere :)

[Edit]... Oh... wait. The caster of the spell being countered gets the birds. There probably shouldn't be a line break there... I read two different abilities going off and assumed you were getting a pile of birds and countering an opponent's spell. Obviously, we know why that is wrong.

Though, I must admit, this seems like a good way for a green deck to get a bunch of flying creatures on the table. Just cast Ornithopter and cast this, countering your own spell. -2 cards seems worth it for seven birds. If you don't mind being down a bird, you can flash those birds into play by countering your own Giant Growth.

Countering your own spell doesn't seem like a problem to me; green could just run One Dozen Eyes instead of this, and be down one less card.

Well, that might be true, if it weren't for the flying thing. I guess, technically, one could just play Hornet Queen. Man, I hate that card.

If, however, you gave me this card:

­
Instant
As an additional cost to play ~, discard a spell.
Put X 1/1 flying bird tokens onto the battlefield.

I'd run that over One Dozen Eyes. Card advantage isn't that important, when you're winning.

I guess so. As I said; they're only fliers because of the name. They probably ought to be just 1/1 tokens. Or we could apply a mallet and put in "spell an opponent controls" though that still leads to multiplayer shenanigans.

If you wanted to nerf it you could make it "costing X" instead of "costing X or less", then you can't pay X=5 to counter Giant Growth.

But I'm not sure if it's necessary. On the one hand, paying and two cards (with the caveat of only working sometimes) seems a fair cost for X flying tokens. And green getting flying is more of a flavour thing, it's apparently ok occasionally. (Although now I want a mythic rare that creates X flying green birds with : Add one mana of any colour to your mana pool! :)) On the other hand, I tend to underestimate how good token-makers and X-spells are.