Daru Stinger

Amplify was an early-era answer to a structural problem with tribal payoffs: how do you reward a creature type without making the reward dead on an empty board? The mechanic turns the cards you have not yet played into fuel, scaling a body up front for each tribesmate revealed, and this Soldier converts that scaling into a repeatable point of combat removal. The counters do double duty here: they size the creature and they meter the damage its tap ability deals. Reveal three other Soldiers and it enters as a 4/4 carrying three counters, able to tap to deal three to any attacker or blocker; reveal nothing and it is the printed 1/1 whose tap ability has nothing to deal. That all-or-nothing curve is the cost of the design, tying the card's strength directly to how committed your hand is to the tribe. The pinging is also deliberately fenced to combat: it can only target attacking or blocking creatures, so it works as a deterrent and a combat-math swing rather than a free Royal Assassin that picks off anything on the board. It rewards holding Soldiers back to maximize amplify, which sits in productive tension with a tribe that wants to flood the board and attack. The result is a creature that is a serious threat in a dedicated build and barely a creature outside one, which is exactly what amplify was engineered to produce.