Drudge Beetle

Scavenge is late-game insurance the early game already paid for: a green two-drop that trades or chumps in the opening turns is not wasted when its corpse can later be exiled from your graveyard to dump counters onto something that matters. The mechanic asks one body to do two jobs in two phases, an early blocker or attacker, then a graveyard resource that converts a dead card into permanent stats on a survivor. The price is deliberately steep relative to what it returns, because you are paying for the second life rather than the first; this is not meant to be scavenged on curve. The sorcery-speed clause keeps it from doubling as a combat trick, so the counters land on your main phase, on your terms. Because scavenge scales with power, the 2/2 returns only two counters, which is exactly the floor of the design: the splashier payoffs belong to the heavier creatures in the cycle, and this one fills the low end. What it represents is the broader move of building a second spell into a creature's text rather than printing a vanilla bear, so the card stays relevant past the turn it dies. Modest on both ends, it is a clean teaching example of how recursion-through-counters lets a body keep earning after combat is done with it.