Carnivorous Moss-Beast

A 4/5 body for six mana with a single mana sink bolted on, and that sink is the whole tell: at per +1/+1 counter, the ability is priced to almost never fire. This is the green workhorse design from the era of vanilla-adjacent commons, the descendant of cards like Spined Wurm that gave a deck a dependable beater without complicating the board. The difference here is the firewall: the counter clause exists, but it costs seven mana for a single point in each direction, so it functions less as a real growth engine and more as a "you have nothing else to do" outlet when a game grinds long enough that excess mana would otherwise rot in your pool. The 4/5 statline is the actual product. It blocks the ground respectably, trades up against most attackers its size, and sits at the top of a curve as a fair finisher rather than a tempo play. There is no evasion, no triggered ability, no synergy hook to build around; the counter activation is deliberately walled behind a price high enough that it rarely changes a game, which is exactly what a high-cost common is supposed to do. What it is for is uncomplicated: a green midrange body that holds a stalled board and, in the rare game that stalls past the seven-mana-per-turn threshold, slowly climbs out of burn range.