Locthwain Paladin

Adamant was a mechanic built to reward color commitment without demanding it: cast the spell however your mana allows, but pay with enough of one color and you get a bonus. Here the payoff is small and self-contained. Meet the three-black threshold and the body arrives as a 4/3 instead of a 3/2; miss it and you still have a serviceable evasive attacker. There is no downside to the miss, which is exactly how adamant is meant to behave: it never punishes a splashy manabase, it only sweetens a devoted one. What makes this particular design tidy is how the counter interacts with the menace it comes bundled with. Menace already means no single blocker can stop the creature, so the defender is always spending two bodies or a removal spell no matter which mode you get. The counter does not change that math; it changes what those two bodies have to survive. A 3/2 with menace is a clock the opponent can gang-block and eat cleanly, trading two small creatures for one and coming out ahead. Push the body to 4/3 and that double-block stops being clean value: the extra point of toughness lets it survive more of the two-for-one exchanges the defender wants to make, and the extra power punishes them harder if they don't. That is a meaningful swing packed into a common-rarity aggressive slot, and it reflects an era of loading small creatures with conditional upside so a mono-color commitment pays off at the margins.