Ezuri, Claw of Progress

Experience counters were the mechanic this design announced, and anchoring the flagship on small creatures rather than spells or attacks is what gives it a distinct shape. The number never resets and never decreases: each creature you control with power 2 or less that enters bumps a permanent tally upward, and at the beginning of combat on your turn that tally becomes a lump of +1/+1 counters delivered onto a single target. The synergy is structural rather than incidental. A go-wide token deck and a one-drop tribal deck both feed it for free, because the threshold catches almost every utility creature worth running: mana dorks, hatebears, blink targets, sacrifice fodder. The payoff then ignores the bodies that built it and dumps the entire experience total onto one creature, converting a board of small accumulators into a lethal threat, often with infect or trample or evasion attached. That redirection is the tension the card resolves: the little creatures are the engine, but they are rarely the finisher. The combat trigger keys off the beginning of combat on your turn, which is a subtler leash than it looks: any effect that grants an additional combat phase fires it again, so the counter dump scales not just with your experience total but with how many combats you can manufacture. The experience-counter framework would anchor several later commanders, but few paired it with a snowballing counter-distribution payoff rather than a passive bonus. The result reads less like a tribal lord and more like an escalating clock that gets worse every turn you keep building.