Dueling Coach

A 2/2 that plants a single counter on entry is a modest opening, and the front half of this card is honest about that: it primes the board and little more. The whole design lives in the repeatable tap, which adds one +1/+1 counter to every creature you already have carrying a counter, all at once. That gate is deliberate. A single activation does little for a lone creature; it only becomes explosive once you have several bodies already counting counters, so the card asks a +1/+1-counters deck to reach a critical mass of eligible targets before the sink is worth paying. The steep repeatable cost is what keeps a wide board from spiraling early: five mana per pump is a heavy toll that rewards patience over a fast start. It sits in a lineage of white counter-support pieces that grow a board rather than flood it with tokens, less a curve-topper than a mana sink that pays off an army you have already assembled. The two halves are designed to hand off to each other: the enters trigger seeds the first counter, and the tap ability then feeds on every counter the deck accumulates, scaling upward the longer the game runs and the more creatures survive to hold what they've grown. Neither half does much alone; together they turn a stalled board into a grind-it-out engine.