Deeproot Champion

A green Quirion Dryad wearing a Merfolk Shaman type line, and that tribal tag is what gives the card its whole reason for being. The dryad template (a 1/1 that grows every time you cast a noncreature spell) had lived in spellslinger shells for years, where the body was incidental to the gameplan and the counters were a clock you tacked onto a control deck. Here that same engine gets handed to a tribe that wants to play creatures and pump them, which creates a genuine tension: the payoff rewards a deck full of instants and sorceries, but the tribal support around it wants bodies on the board. The counter accrues on the cast, not on resolution, so it survives a countered spell and triggers off cantrips, pump, and removal alike; a single turn of stacking cheap noncreature spells can turn the 1/1 into a real threat before blockers are arranged. What it lacks is any built-in evasion or protection, so the growth means little unless the deck can force the damage through. Sitting at the crossroads of two archetypes that rarely want the same cards is what makes building around it a puzzle rather than a default.