Gnoll Hunter

The mechanic here is a threshold, not a payoff, and this Gnoll is its plainest expression: a 2/2 that grows only when the swing it joins already commits six power to the red zone. The counter it earns is real and permanent, but the condition arrives late in the calculus. You need the board built before the trigger does anything, which means the creature that benefits is not the reason you have the board, it is the reward for having it. That reversal defines how the whole ability plays: rather than incentivizing a wide attack the way a lord or an anthem does, it asks whether you were already going wide, then quietly upgrades the creatures that showed up. On an empty board it is a plain 2/2, and it stays one for as long as your attacks stay small. The ability is closer to a snowball than a trick: once the counter lands the body clears the six-power bar more easily on subsequent turns, so the second trigger is cheaper to hit than the first. It is a design that reads as aggressive and behaves as consolidation, rewarding the deck that was winning the ground war anyway rather than the one hunting for a swing to break open.