Backup Agent

The counter has to land somewhere, and that constraint is doing quiet work. A permanent +1/+1 counter stapled to an enters trigger means the value survives whatever removal answers this fragile body: kill the courier and the growth stays where you put it. That makes it a distribution engine more than a creature, a way to bank two mana of stats onto a target that matters and then treat the Human Citizen as fodder. The design leans on that separation of source and payoff. Where a raw pump spell lives and dies with the caster's card, this splits the transaction into two objects, so the counter can outlast the vessel that delivered it. It rewards decks that want to move counters around after the fact (proliferate shells, counter-doublers, sacrifice loops that recycle the trigger) because the effect is a durable resource rather than a moment. Read narrowly, it just makes a creature slightly bigger for two mana. The reason to reach for it is the permanence: the counter is the product, and the body is just the courier.