Herald of Secret Streams

Counters tribal got its evasion enabler here. The +1/+1 counter has always been the most parallel-friendly buff in the game: anthems pump everything once, but counters stick to individual bodies and accumulate across spells, abilities, and proliferate triggers. The trouble is that a board of fat creatures still has to get through, and grindier decks are happy to chump until they stabilize. This turns the counter from a size bonus into a delivery mechanism: every creature already carrying a counter (which, in a deck built to put them everywhere, is most of them) walks past the entire defense. It is a static effect, not a one-shot, so the whole team keeps its evasion as long as the body sticks around, and it scales with a strategy that wants to go wide rather than tall. The 2/3 frame keeps it honest: this is a glass-cannon engine, not a threat, and it dies to the same removal that would have answered any other support creature. What it asks for in return is a shell that reliably distributes counters, at which point the static line stops reading as a Merfolk curiosity and starts reading as the reason the counters deck closes games at all.