Flying Octobot

The counter clause reads like a lord's cheerleader, but the once-per-turn restriction is what actually shapes how you play it. A 1/1 flier that grows a single counter per turn no matter how many Villains flood in rewards a slow, sustained board over an explosive one: dumping three Villains in one turn nets the same lone counter as playing one. That caps the payoff and pushes toward attrition, keeping the growth curve linear and predictable rather than snowballing out of a wide turn. The evasion is the piece that makes the accumulation matter: flying steers the counters onto a body the ground stalemate cannot answer, so a creature that starts as a chump becomes a clock over anything without flying or reach. Holding the whole thing together is the Villain type-line dependency. It is a tribal payoff that only pays as fast as your tribe develops, a gentler and more honest design than a lord scaling with raw creature count. Left alone, it turns into a real threat over several turns; pressured early, it is a fragile two-mana flier that trades down. Commit to Villains as a build-around and the reward is patience, not a single blowout turn.