Cathedral Acolyte

Two abilities that don't obviously belong on the same card, until you notice they're built to feed each other. The tap ability seeds counters, but only onto creatures that entered the battlefield this turn, which is a tight window: you can pump a fresh arrival while the summoning ink is still wet, then leave the counter behind as a permanent trace. That trace is what the static ability collects. Every creature you control wearing a counter gets ward , so the +1/+1 counters this card distributes aren't just stat bumps; they're each a small tax on removal, turning your board into a field of targets an opponent has to pay a premium to touch. The design ties protection to a resource the card itself manufactures, one counter at a time, one creature per turn. It rewards a deck that already traffics in counters (proliferate shells, +1/+1-matters builds, anything that keeps counters sitting on creatures) because the ward doesn't care where the counter came from, only that it's there and the permanent is a creature: a planeswalker's loyalty or an artifact's charge counters buy no protection unless that permanent is itself a creature too. Left alone, a 1/2 for granting a marginal tax reads as filler. Given a board that already runs on counters, it quietly converts a whole archetype's bookkeeping into a defensive layer, which is a more interesting job than the body suggests.