Iron Apprentice

The counter is the whole payload, and the body is just the vessel that delivers it. A 0/0 that enters with a +1/+1 counter is functionally a 1/1, but the design isn't interested in the 1/1: it's interested in what happens when that 1/1 dies. The counter it carries doesn't evaporate with the creature; it migrates to another creature you control, which turns the thing that killed your Apprentice into a resource transfer rather than a loss. That reframes cheap removal against it as a bad trade and makes it a natural line of least resistance for any deck that wants counters to accumulate somewhere durable. It also scales: if you've stacked additional counters onto it before it dies (proliferate, other counter sources, a modular-style pile), all of them relocate at once, so the card's ceiling is set by how many counters you can load onto a body you fully intend to feed into combat or a sacrifice outlet. The lineage here is the old modular idea from artifact creatures like Arcbound Worker, where a death was a handoff rather than a setback, but this version is color-agnostic and lands in green-white counter shells as easily as anywhere else. What it asks of a deckbuilder is a place for the counters to land and a reason not to mind the trip: the more your board wants +1/+1 counters, the less this creature's death costs you.