Bounty of the Hunt

Part of the Alliances free-spell cycle, and the one built to ambush combat. The pitch line is the whole design: instead of paying five mana, you exile a green card from hand, which turns the spell into a blowout you can fire with every land tapped out. The counters being temporary is what keeps that free combat trick honest: three +1/+1 counters land at instant speed to win a block or push lethal, then a delayed trigger at the next cleanup step peels them away, so you rent a swing rather than buy permanent stats. The free line is a bluff weapon as much as a tempo play: an opponent has to respect a green hand and untapped creatures even when you have no mana available, because the card never needs the mana to fire. The cleanup clause is blunter than it looks; the delayed trigger removes a +1/+1 counter from the creature for each one the spell placed, and counters are fungible, so it cannot be dodged by stacking other +1/+1 counters onto the same body. Paid normally, the effect would be badly overpriced; paid for free during a declare-blockers step, it rewrites the math of a race in a way few combat tricks of its era could match.