Battlegrowth

Permanent investment for a single green mana, paid out in a counter that never expires. Where Giant Growth buys one combat step and then evaporates, this leaves the creature bigger forever: the boost survives end-of-turn, persists through the next sweep that checks toughness, and stacks with every other counter the board accumulates. One mana for a flat +1/+1 is an unremarkable trade in isolation, and that modesty is deliberate. The card is priced for repetition and synergy, not for the lone trick. It wants a creature that already cares about counters, or a board where each instant-speed pump compounds over several turns into a real clock. The instant timing is where the rate earns itself back, letting it ambush a blocker or lift a creature out of range of a damage-based removal spell during a window when a sorcery-speed counter would arrive too late. As a baseline, it is the cleanest statement of green's permanent-buff philosophy: cheap, flexible on timing, and intentionally small in magnitude so that the payoff lives in the board you build around it rather than in the spell itself.