Anointer of Valor

The counter goes on the attacker, not necessarily your attacker. That is the wrinkle worth sitting with: the trigger reads "whenever a creature attacks," with no ownership restriction, so the effect fires on every attack at every table, yours and everyone else's. In practice you keep the mana up for your own board, but the ability is a group-wide standing offer to pump the crew, one three-mana installment at a time, at whatever moment a creature turns sideways. Framed that way (a repeatable, pay-as-you-go counter dispenser rather than a burst), it behaves nothing like the anthem-style static boosters it superficially resembles. Each payment is its own discrete tax, so the card scales with how much mana you can dump and how many attack triggers you can string together rather than handing out a flat bonus for free. The 3/5 flying body is a deliberately modest chassis for the engine: five toughness gives it enough to hold ground and chip in the air, while the middling power keeps it from reading as a clock, which is precisely how a mana sink wants to look. It rewards a board wide enough that "pay , grow the attacker" is a meaningful choice several times per turn cycle, and it politely does nothing the turn you tap out. A slow, grindy counters-matter payoff whose ceiling rises and falls with how much mana you leave open.