Minthara, Merciless Soul

Experience counters are one of the harder resources to build a deck around, because unlike +1/+1 counters or Treasure, they only ever accumulate: there is no natural cost, no way to spend them, no drawback attached. This design leans into that permanence and makes it the whole engine. The end-step trigger asks for the smallest possible sacrifice of intent (any permanent you controlled leaving play, whether a token dying, a fetchland cracking, or a creature blocked to death), and every counter you bank does double duty. It scales her own ward, so the more you have invested the harder she is to answer, and it hands every creature you control a growing power boost that never resets. The anthem is why the card wants a wide, disposable board rather than a tall one: aristocrat shells, token generators, and sacrifice fodder all feed the same tally, and the boost rewards flooding the battlefield precisely with the permanents you are happy to lose. The tension the design resolves is that experience counters usually reward a slow, careful deck that lives forever; here the counters come from throwing things away, so the safest resource in the game gets tied to the least safe way of playing. Ward priced in your own accumulated progress means a Minthara left alone for four turns becomes functionally unkillable on the cheap, which is exactly the trajectory an aristocrats deck is already trying to run.