Bloodthirsty Adversary

A hasty 2/2 for is the floor here, and floors are what matter for a card meant to stay relevant across a whole game. The payload sits behind an optional, repeatable tax paid as it enters: each you feed the trigger buys a +1/+1 counter and lets you exile an instant or sorcery of mana value three or less from your graveyard and cast the copy for free. That entry-fee structure is the whole build. On an empty board with tight mana, you play it as a clean aggressive two-drop and pay nothing extra. Flooded out in the midgame, you dump excess mana into the trigger for two or three counters and a hand's worth of free spells, all decided the moment it hits the battlefield. The two modes never fight over a slot because the card commits to one or the other on arrival rather than banking a sink for later. The exile clause is what keeps it from spiraling: you spend graveyard resources rather than rebuying them, so the payoff caps at whatever your yard actually holds. It sits in a lineage of creatures that recycle spent spells into pressure (Snapcaster Mage does the recursion at instant speed for one mana; Young Pyromancer converts casts into bodies), but this folds recursion, free copies, and a threat that grows with every overpayment into a single mana-sink attacker.