Blue Marvel, Adam Brashear

What makes this a payoff worth building around is where the threshold sits: not the first card you draw, which is free every turn, but the second, which most decks reach only by spending a card or running an engine. The counter arrives once per turn regardless of whether you draw two cards or twenty, so the reward scales with reliability, not with any single explosive draw. That reframes the deckbuilder's target away from raw card advantage and toward hitting a modest quota every single turn: a Divination after your draw step, a cantrip you were already casting, a symmetric draw engine like Howling Mine, an on-turn Wheel effect. The counters accrue one at a time across a long game rather than in bursts, which makes this a slow clock whose ceiling is a function of how many turns you keep the second-draw trigger online. Ward protects that accumulated investment, taxing every removal spell aimed at a body that flying and five toughness already make inconvenient to kill; by the time it matters, the two mana is the difference between clearing the counters cheaply and letting them keep compounding. The result punishes stalling in both directions: yours, when you fail to draw twice and the counter never lands, and the opponent's, when they let a 3/5 grow unchecked because there was always something more urgent to answer.