Leech Bonder

This Merfolk arrives already shrunk, a 3/3 wearing two -1/-1 counters, and the only way it improves is by carrying that drag somewhere else. The activation reads backwards from most abilities: it untaps to fire rather than tapping, so the body has to already be committed (attacked, tapped by an outlet, tipped over by some other cost) before it can shuttle a counter, and each use sets it up to fire again next turn. The obvious line is to slide those minuses onto an enemy creature, weakening a blocker while the Merfolk heals back toward its printed stats, but the ability is indifferent to which counter and whose creature. It moves any counter sitting on one creature onto another: a +1/+1 lifted off your own attacker and parked on a second body, a -1/-1 dragged off a token and onto a threat, any mark the creatures on the board happen to be carrying. That makes it a relocation engine whose ceiling tracks the number of counters in play, not the line on its card. The friction is the tap requirement governing its rhythm: this design wants a creature that swings and untaps into the ability, not one held back to block. It comes from a stretch of design that treated counters as a shared, mobile resource to be ferried between permanents rather than a fixed property of one, and it pays off in proportion to how much counter traffic the board generates.