Mutated Cultist

Counter removal has almost always been framed as interaction: strip the loyalty off a planeswalker, shrink a creature that has been growing, undo the poison an opponent has accumulated. What sets this design apart is that it reads counters as fuel rather than as a threat to dismantle. The cast trigger pays you back for the disruption, converting each removed counter into a discount on your next spell that turn, which turns a defensive action into ramp. The targeting is wide within its lane (any permanent, or an opponent), so the card is happy to eat your own counters when nothing better presents itself: a leveled-up permanent, a saga that has done its work, a charge counter on an artifact you have finished exploiting. It just cannot point at you, so the counters on your own player (energy, experience, poison) sit outside its reach. That asymmetry is worth noting, because the effect otherwise scales with whatever the table is doing to permanents. The deathtouch body is the fallback the design leans on when the trigger has nowhere useful to point; a 1/3 that trades up in combat keeps the card from being dead in the hand when the board is barren. Devoid marks it as one of the colorless Horrors rather than a plain black creature, though the practical consequence is narrow. The tension worth sitting with is that the more counters a table generates, the more this card wants to exist.