Frostweb Spider

Most reach creatures are static walls: they block the dragon, they trade or they survive, and nothing changes. This one inverts that relationship by making the block itself the payoff. Every time it survives an attack from the air, it grows a permanent +1/+1 counter at end of combat, so the flyer that flew into a 1/3 once meets a 2/4 the next turn, then a 3/5. The design rewards the defender for getting attacked, turning an evasion-heavy opponent's own game plan into a snowballing ground threat. The trigger is the whole pivot, and its timing is the catch worth understanding: the counter lands at end of combat, after damage, so a flyer that pumps big enough to deal three or more does not feed the spider at all; it kills it outright. The block has to be survivable for the engine to turn. That makes the card a pure reactive proposition: it does nothing on offense, nothing against creatures that stay on the ground, and nothing if the opponent simply never sends a flyer at it, in which case it sits as an ordinary 1/3 wall. Its ceiling is dictated entirely by how committed the other player is to attacking through the clouds. The snow supertype is incidental, a fingerprint of the design era's snow-matters theme rather than a load-bearing part of the card; the counter engine is the idea worth remembering.