Dragon's Disciple

A support piece with a conditional entry fee, resolved as a replacement effect rather than a trigger: the +1/+1 counter comes free if you already control a Dragon, and if you don't, you can rent one from your hand by revealing it face-up instead of casting it. That reveal clause is the clever bit of the design, because it lets the card pay its own bonus with a Dragon you have no intention of deploying yet, turning an otherwise stranded top-of-curve card in hand into a two-drop enabler. The real payload, though, is the ward it hangs on every Dragon you control. A 1/3 body is not why this creature exists; it exists to tax an opponent's removal on threats that already demand answers. Ward is a modest surcharge on its own, but Dragons tend to be exactly the permanents an opponent most wants to point a spell at, and the disciple asks them to pay a premium every time. It rewards a critical mass of large, expensive fliers by making each one incrementally harder to kill, which is precisely the axis a tribal deck built around a handful of high-value bombs cares about. Strip the Dragons away and both abilities go inert: the counter clause finds nothing to reveal, the ward anchor has nothing to protect, and you are left with a 1/3 that does no work. Its value is entirely a function of how many Dragons share the battlefield with it.