Malanthrope

Graveyard hate that grows itself is a rare marriage: most exile-the-yard effects are pure disruption, a spell you'd rather not draw against a deck with an empty bin. Bolting the effect onto an evasive body flips that math. Against a creature-heavy graveyard the counters pile on fast, turning a two-power flier into a real clock; against an empty one you've still paid for a 2/2 with flying. The design leans on the same instinct that made Scavenging Ooze and Deathrite Shaman worth running maindeck: hate that carries its own reason to be there. The wrinkle here is that the exile is a one-time enters trigger, not a repeatable engine, so its ceiling is set entirely by what's already sitting in a yard when it arrives. That makes it a tempo play rather than an attrition one; you want it late enough that the graveyard is stocked but early enough that the counters matter. Green-blue is the natural home, pairing the growth half's ramp-and-value instincts with blue's evasion, and the flying keyword is what keeps the accumulated counters from being purely decorative. It reads as a fair midrange creature that happens to punish the graveyard-fueled decks green-blue often struggles to race, which is a tidy piece of role compression for three mana.