Baloth Gorger

A vanilla 4/4 is the most replaceable green creature template there is, which is precisely the gap kicker exists to close. The unkicked mode is the scaled-up green bear: a body that asks nothing of your mana and never embarrasses you on the curve. Pay the kicker and the same card becomes a 7/7 for eight, a top-end threat that arrives in a single cast rather than being assembled over two. The delivery mechanism matters. The kicked version arrives carrying its extra size on three +1/+1 counters, which means it plays with proliferate and counter-doublers, and it survives effects that shrink power at the source. That permanence cuts both ways. Because the counters live on the permanent and kicked status is only checked as the spell resolves, bounce or flicker strips everything: a returned Baloth Gorger comes back a plain 4/4, no longer kicked, its counters gone. Inside those limits it is the oldest trick in modular creature design, one card written to fill the early slot or the late slot depending on what your mana looks like and engineered never to be a dead draw. Flooding out, you sink the surplus into a bigger threat; stuck on lands, you still have a serviceable beater. It reaches for nothing past that: clean, honest green filler whose entire pitch is that it scales with your mana and asks nothing back.