Cached Defenses

Bolster's design conceit is subtraction: it hands you a pump but strips out the target line, forcing the counters onto the weakest body you control by toughness. You still choose when a tie exists, but the mechanic sizes the whole cycle around removing free placement, which is what pays for a rate that would be aggressive on a clean targeted spell. Three counters is a lot of stats for the mana; the auto-selection is the tax that keeps it honest, because the board usually points the counters at the least valuable creature you have: the chump, the spare token, the throwaway blocker. The card's real job is finding a board where your smallest creature is the one you actually want bigger, which means either going wide with uniform bodies (so it barely matters where the counters land) or deliberately deploying a single under-statted threat you plan to load up. That constraint is also why it plays slower than a targeted pump and misfires more easily: its value tracks how predictable your own creatures are, the opposite axis most combat tricks reward. Bolster answered a genuine question for green, namely how to distribute +1/+1 counters without a "target creature" clause, and this sorcery is one of the plainer places that answer shows up: only as good as the board you cast it into, and asking you to build that board on purpose.