A-Celestial Regulator
The tapper is one of the oldest tempo tools in the game, but this one splits its payoff along a conditional the rest of its type never asked for. Tap a creature you don't control on the way in, and that alone is the floor: a defensive flier that reaches into the opponent's board and holds the ground behind it. Control a creature carrying a counter, though, and the tap becomes a lock, the target frozen through its next untap step, effectively removed from two combats. The design lives entirely in that "creature with a counter" clause, which is doing double duty: it rewards a specific kind of board (the +1/+1 counter decks, the adventure and support-creature shells that leave stray counters lying around) without demanding anything specific of the Regulator itself. The 1/4 statline is chosen deliberately, a body that would rather trade blockers away and hold position than race, which is the correct chassis for a card whose real job is denying an attacker two turns of participation. This is the rebalanced Arena version, tuned to sit at a rate where the conditional payoff is a genuine reward rather than an assumed baseline. It is a tempo piece built to make a counters deck's incidental byproducts worth a full second effect, and nothing about it pretends to be more.
