Afterburner Expert

The recursion here reads off any exhaust activation, not just this card's own, and that is the wrinkle that changes how you build. Exhaust abilities can each fire only once per copy per game, so this Goblin comes with a hard ceiling: pay the once, stack two +1/+1 counters, and that button is spent for good. What keeps a 4/2 from being a one-and-done body is the graveyard trigger, which watches the whole board. Every time you activate an exhaust ability anywhere (on another permanent, or on a fresh copy of this creature), this one returns from the graveyard to the battlefield at its printed 4/2. The self-growth line and the recursion line are deliberately separate: the counters only land while it is on the battlefield to receive them, so a card climbing back out of the yard arrives at its base body, never pre-pumped. The payoff, then, is not a value engine you loop but a resilience reward for a deck already leaning on exhaust as a theme. If you are activating those abilities anyway, this Goblin keeps clawing back onto the field for free, and the more exhaust permanents you run, the more often it resurfaces. It asks you to build a critical mass of the mechanic rather than to build around this single card, and it repays the density with a body that refuses to stay dead.