Drillworks Mole

A mana sink that grows two things at once, and the "up to one" phrasing is what keeps it flexible rather than fragile: it works fine as a lone one-drop pumping itself into a real threat, but its ceiling arrives when each activation splits between its own body and a commander at the head of the table. The design lives entirely in the doctrine that a commander is a permanent, repeatable investment worth pouring counters into, one that a deck is built to keep on the battlefield in a way no other creature can promise. That promise is conditional, though: counters vanish when a creature changes zones, so a commander that dies and gets recast comes back stripped of everything the Mole put on it. That makes the card an engine for the board you are keeping, not an insurance policy against removal, and it prices its own payoff honestly. Efficiency and patience pull against each other here: at one mana it costs almost nothing to deploy, but every activation is a two-mana tax that only pays out across the long, grinding games where a commander is the axis rather than a liability. Small on cardboard and slow to matter, it is a clean expression of the counters-matter subtheme aimed squarely at the creature a Commander deck is built around.