Increasing Savagery

Five counters now, ten later, and the gap between those two numbers is the whole pitch. The base mode is a serviceable but expensive pump: four mana to make a creature meaningfully larger. It is the flashback the card is actually built around. Paying the seven-mana flashback cost is steep, but doubling the payload to ten counters means the graveyard cast is not a recursive top-up: it is the better half of the spell. That inversion is the wrinkle worth sitting with. Most flashback cards offer a diminished or merely repeated effect the second time around, one more use stapled to the back. This one rewards the patient line, treating the graveyard as a deliberate staging ground rather than a backup plan. Cast it early to commit a threat, let that creature die or trade, then exhume the card for a payoff large enough to push a single body past most board states on its own. The counters themselves are sticky in a way one-shot pumps are not: they survive the spell that placed them, they stack with anything else feeding the same creature, and they reward a deck already invested in something it does not want to lose. The sorcery speed is the cost of that ambition, both halves planting their feet on your own turn, but the second printing of those numbers is where a modest enchant-a-creature spell turns into a finisher.