Haliya, Ascendant Cadet

The recurring problem with counters-matters as a draw engine has always been the ramp-up: you spend the early turns assembling a board that only cashes out once a critical mass of counters is already in play, and the payoff card typically does nothing until someone else has done that work. This design collapses that timeline. The counter generation and the card draw share a single body, so the moment it enters and rolls a counter forward, it has already begun feeding the draw clause; the first combat step where a counter-bearing creature connects is also the first card off the top. That self-priming loop is the real departure from earlier counters-matters payoffs, which only rewarded a board someone had to build first. The 3/3 for five is modest by intent, because the value lives in the recursion of the attack trigger: every combat it survives drops another counter and widens the pool of creatures capable of triggering the draw. The draw condition is deliberately broad in what qualifies (any creature you control carrying a counter, not just the one the trigger targeted) yet tight in rate: one card per player dealt combat damage by counter-bearing creatures, not one per attacker. That distinction keeps the go-wide plan honest, paying you for connecting rather than for swarming. Green-white counters decks have circled the same problem for years: how to let the theme draw cards without asking the deck to slow its clock. Here the clock is the draw.