Dragon Blood

Three mana and a tap to grow a creature by a single counter: that is a punishing rate, and it is the whole story of how counter-generation was priced before the design world worked out what permanent stat growth was worth. The activation is colorless and repeatable, asking nothing of the deck except that you spend an entire turn's resources to lay down one point of power and toughness somewhere. The design is notable less for the rate than for the proof of concept: a colorless artifact that manufactures +1/+1 counters on demand, untethered from any combat trigger, sacrifice, or upkeep clock. That idea later became cheap and ubiquitous, attached to creatures, lands, and one-mana enablers across a dozen mechanics. Here it sits in its expensive infancy, an engine that grinds slowly enough that the slow grind was considered fair. The flavor name promises a transformative substance; the mechanics deliver incremental accumulation, which is a fair summary of how the era thought about open-ended growth. It maps the distance between an early design instinct and its eventual refinement, valuable now less for what it does at the table than for marking where the +1/+1 counter as a free-floating resource began.