Algae Gharial

Two restrictions sit on the same body, and the trade between them is the entire reason the card looks the way it does. The growth engine is open-ended: every creature that dies anywhere, yours or theirs, can feed a counter, and in a grindy attrition game that adds up fast. Left unchecked, a free-scaling 1/1 that snowballs off the graveyard would be a removal magnet the instant it threatened to matter, so the protection has to do real work. Shroud is the answer, and it answers cleanly: once the counters start stacking, the opponent cannot point a spell or ability at it to reset the investment. The same keyword cuts the other way, since you cannot target it either, which rules out the obvious play of pumping it with combat tricks or feeding it your own enchantments; the only way it grows is through death, and the only thing it does is keep the body you have built. That self-imposed narrowness is the cost. You get an attacker that can become genuinely enormous over a long game and is nearly impossible to remove with conventional answers, in exchange for any flexibility in how you interact with it. It is a patient card by construction: it asks for a board where creatures are dying in volume and a game long enough for a 1/1 to outlast everything that could have killed it earlier.