Chomping Kavu

Backup is a keyword built around a fork in the road: the counter lands on this creature if you play it fair, or on a teammate if you want to hand the bonus outward, and only in the latter case does the rider tag along. Most of the cycle attaches an evasion or combat clause to justify that reach; this one grants a menace-adjacent gate, locking out any blocker with power 2 or less. That is a narrower opening than trample or flying, and it tells you what the card is for. The 3/3 body is a fine attacker on its own, and targeting itself makes it a 4/4 that can't be chumped by the wall of small tokens and mana dorks a green board tends to field. Point the counter at a teammate instead and you rent that same evasion out for a turn while the +1/+1 stays behind permanently: that split, the temporary rider versus the durable stat bump, is the quiet efficiency of the whole cycle. The design's discipline lives in the power-2 threshold. It does nothing against a defensive line of larger creatures, so the ability is a scalpel for grindy ground stalls rather than a blanket unblockable. Read as a single card, it is a modular combat trick stapled to a body, deployable on turn four as a beater or held to break a clogged attack open.