Ajani's Comrade

The growth clause is conditional on controlling an Ajani planeswalker, which turns this from a creature into a payoff: a body that snowballs into a real clock, but only inside a shell built around one specific named walker. That is a hard prerequisite to hang on a two-drop, and it belongs to a small lineage of creatures whose printed power assumes a particular permanent is already on the board. The sequencing tells the story: at two mana it hits the table early and sits as a plain trampler, waiting for an Ajani to land on a later turn and switch the beginning-of-combat trigger on. Trample matters more here than the keyword usually does, because the whole point is the counter pile: once the combat trigger has fired a few times, the accumulated size shoves damage past chump blockers, which is exactly the situation trample exists to punish. The trigger fires at the beginning of combat on your turn, so any deck that manufactures a second combat phase gets a second counter that turn, which sharpens the payoff for anyone leaning on extra-combat effects. Without an Ajani in play, though, the ability lies dormant and what remains is a vanilla-adjacent 2/2, a floor the rest of the deck has to unlock. There is no flexibility to soften the gap: the design names its dependency without apology and tells you precisely which kind of deck it was built to live in.