Hamza, Guardian of Arashin

The cost reduction reads once, but it fires twice, and that doubling is the whole design. Most build-around commanders that discount your spells scale off a single axis: lands, creatures on board, cards in graveyard. Here the same counter that shaves the Elephant's own cost also shaves every creature you cast afterward, so a board of creatures carrying counters collapses your entire curve at once. What matters is the count of bodies with counters, not the height of the counters on them: five separate creatures each wearing a single +1/+1 counter shave the next creature spell by five mana, while one creature stacked with five counters shaves only one. That distinction pushes the deck toward going wide rather than tall, toward spreading counters across a field rather than piling them on a lone threat. What keeps it from running away is that the reduction pays out only on creatures that already carry counters, not the one you are trying to cast: the engine rewards a board that has already resolved, which means it wants a shell built to survive to the point where the effect matters at all. This is a payoff that arrives late and then arrives all at once, and the color identity points it squarely at the +1/+1 counter strategies that were still finding their shape when this kind of go-wide counters payoff first appeared. It puts no counters anywhere itself; it converts a counters board into a cost engine, which makes it a capstone rather than a starting point.