District Mascot

A green artifact-hater built as a self-refilling counter engine, which is a stranger sentence than the rate suggests. It enters as a 1/1 (a 0/0 wearing one counter), and its artifact removal is not a spell but a repeatable activation: pay and pull two counters to destroy an artifact. The two-counter cost is the gate, and it interacts pointedly with a body that only arrives with one. You cannot fire the ability out of the gate; you have to grow the creature first. Grow it once to a two-counter body and you can activate, but stripping both counters drops it back to 0/0 and it dies with the artifact. Grow it twice and the removal is free of that cost: three counters down to one leaves a survivor on the table. That is the real management problem the card poses. The saddle trigger is the wrinkle that turns a one-shot into a loop: each attack while saddled banks another counter, so the more it swings the more removal it stockpiles, and every combat step becomes a choice between cashing counters for an artifact and hoarding them into a bigger threat. Green's artifact answers have historically been one-shot spells or stapled enters triggers; recasting that as a counter-managed loop, paid in both mana and saddle attacks, is what the design is actually doing. The body is never the reason it makes a deck. The standing threat of deleting an artifact every couple of swings is.