Adherent of Hope

A tribute card in the most literal sense: its entire upside is conditional on sharing the board with a specific planeswalker, and if that Basri never lands, you are left holding a plain 2/1 for two. That conditionality is the whole design bargain. Each combat on your turn, so long as the Basri survives, the creature swells by a counter, a slow and repeatable payoff that compounds only if you keep a fragile permanent alive. That turns the body into a clock scaling with how well you protect a planeswalker rather than how well you curve out. It is the sort of parasitic reward Wizards attaches to a walker to make a card feel synergistic without granting anything meaningful outside that pairing. Stripped of the Basri requirement, the growth engine would read as a fine common-tier incentive; welded to it, the card asks a question most two-drops never pose: is your deck built around a named permanent, or is it not? For everyone whose answer is no, this is a body and nothing more, which is exactly the price the designers charged for the ceiling.