Farmstead Gleaner

The untap symbol pressed into service as an activation cost rather than a payoff. In most designs that use it, pays out: you tap and untap a creature to generate value, or a permanent untaps itself to do a job twice. Here the flow reverses. The creature refuses to untap on its own, so the only way to stand it back up is to spend the untap symbol as part of the price, and each time you pay you also feed it two mana and hand it a permanent +1/+1 counter. That inversion is the whole design. A 2/2 that begins as a liability (it will not block, will not attack, will not do anything on the turn after it acts) slowly buys itself back into relevance by stacking counters at instant speed. Every activation is a small tug-of-war between mana now and a body later, and because the counters are permanent while the tapped state is only temporary, the math bends toward the patient player. The Scarecrow frame is apt: it loiters in the field doing nothing for a long while, then wakes up as something you would rather not have ignored. The friction it carries is why the growth looks so cheap; a creature that untapped normally would never be allowed to compound counters at this rate. It prices a growth engine in a currency other than mana alone, spending the card's own availability as the ongoing cost.