Durable Handicraft

The trouble with paying for counters per creature is that it asks you to hold up mana you usually want to spend developing the board. This enchantment turns every creature you cast into a tax decision: each body that resolves wants an extra mana to grow, which makes the engine strongest in a deck flooding the board with cheap creatures and weakest in the slow grind it superficially resembles. The optional payment is the lever that keeps it from running away; you only spend on the bodies worth growing, but a counters-matter shell wants to spend on all of them, and the mana strain compounds fast. The sacrifice mode is the off-ramp: when the per-creature trickle stops mattering, you cash the enchantment for a board-wide counter pump, a one-time push that can break a stalled ground. As a green +1/+1-counter payoff it sits in a long line of cards trying to make incremental growth pay for itself, and the design honestly admits the tension by gating both halves behind mana: the slow drip up front, the expensive blowout at the end. The structural catch is one of sequencing rather than board state. The trigger only watches creatures that enter after the enchantment is down, so its value is front-loaded onto whatever you can still deploy, and a creature already on the battlefield when this resolves gets nothing from the per-entry half.