A-Iridescent Hornbeetle
The clever part of this design is the accounting: the payoff triggers off counters put on creatures this turn, not counters that happen to exist. That distinction rewards volume over persistence. Inheriting a board full of already-buffed bodies does nothing for it; what it wants is a turn where counters land in bulk, whether from a single big anthem-style effect, a chain of small ones, or a proliferate that stacks another counter onto everything already carrying one (each of those placements counts, and each becomes a 1/1 Insect at your end step). It sits at the seam of two green subthemes that do not always overlap, the +1/+1 counters matrix and the go-wide token swarm, and it is one of the few cards that literally converts the former into the latter, one counter to one Insect. This is the Alchemy-rebalanced version, and it is worth being precise about what that rebalance touched: the mana cost and body shifted, not the loop. The one-to-one counter-to-token ratio is untouched from the tabletop card; what changed is the frame you get it in. Left alone it is a 3/3 that makes nothing; wrapped around a counters engine it snowballs a board out of the buffs you were already casting, which is a rare kind of double-dip in green's toolkit.
