Mindless Automaton

A colorless engine that treats +1/+1 counters as a storage medium, with the whole design built around the conversion in both directions: spend a card to grow, or shrink to draw a card back. Most card-advantage creatures of its era drew on a fixed schedule or a one-shot enters-the-battlefield trigger; this one banks value as stats and cashes it out on demand, turning hand cards you do not want (discard fuel) into raw size, then turning that size back into fresh cards once the board no longer needs a body. The two functions pull against each other, and that tension is the balancing point: every counter you remove to draw is a point of toughness you no longer have, so the same creature cannot serve as both attacker and card-draw battery without paying for the privilege twice. It is a graveyard-feeding outlet wearing a beatstick's clothes, a piece that wants company among cards rewarding a stocked graveyard or punishing a full hand, since there the discard cost reads as upside rather than tax. The two starting counters mean it never sits on the battlefield as a literal 0/0, but the body is always a means to an end: a place to park value until you need it back as cards.