Cyan, Vengeful Samurai

The base rate is a trap you are never meant to pay: seven mana for a 3/3 double striker is embarrassing on its face, and the entire design assumes you never cast it that way. The cost reduction reads the graveyard, so a full yard turns this into a one- or two-mana threat, reframing the card from top-end payoff into a cheap early aggressor that a self-mill or aristocrats shell can deploy well ahead of curve. What makes the two halves interlock is that the same graveyard powering the discount is the resource the growth ability feeds on. The trigger is deliberately coarse, though: it fires once per event, not once per creature, so it counts moments rather than bodies. A delve spell that exiles five creatures at once nets exactly one counter; a turn that reanimates one creature, escapes another creature, and blinks a third out of the yard with three separate resolutions nets three. That distinction rewards a churning, multi-trigger yard over a single big evacuation, and it steers the deck toward recursion built out of many small events rather than one large one. Double strike is the multiplier that makes those counters matter: each +1/+1 counts twice in combat, so even a handful of triggers translates into a genuinely lethal swing rather than incremental value. The tension the card resolves is the familiar graveyard-payoff bind between filling the yard and emptying it. This one wants both at once: a stocked graveyard to arrive cheaply, then a graveyard cycling creatures in and out to keep the body climbing.