Kurbis, Harvest Celebrant

The counters do double duty here, and that is the whole design conceit: what you pay to cast Kurbis becomes both its body and its ammunition. Cast for a lot of mana and you get a large blocker; cast for a little and you get a fragile one, but either way the counters aren't inert stats. Each one is a one-shot damage-prevention shield you can hand to another creature that also carries a +1/+1 counter, spending Kurbis's own size to keep your board alive through combat or a sweeper's damage-based reach. That constraint (the target must itself have a counter) is what ties the card to a specific kind of deck rather than making it a generic bodyguard: it only protects the archetype it was built to reward, the go-wide counters strategy where half the battlefield qualifies. The tension in playing it is that every activation shrinks Kurbis, so the shield generator is spending itself down toward a 0/0 that dies to a stiff breeze. That is the balancing act: it can absorb a lot of damage over a game, but not indefinitely, and not without eroding the piece doing the absorbing. Most green counters payoffs grow the team or reward a counter's mere presence; converting stored size directly into repeated damage prevention is a narrower, more defensive job, and one green rarely hands out at this cost.