Myr Prototype

Every one of your upkeeps this thing gets stronger, and every one of your upkeeps it gets harder to use, which is the whole joke. The +1/+1 counter that accrues automatically also raises the toll you owe to swing or chump, so a free-to-attack 2/2 becomes a 6/6 that costs four extra mana just to enter combat. The design is a deliberate inversion of the standard counter-accumulation curve: most cards that grow over time get better the longer they live (the snowball is the reward), but here the snowball is also the tax. Left alone, it idles forever as an immovable wall that cannot block either, sitting on a body that escalates into uselessness unless you have mana to spare. The escape hatch is to remove the counters yourself, which is where it stops being a curiosity and starts being a build-around: proliferate is exactly the wrong direction, but anything that pulls counters off (or moves them somewhere productive) flips the liability into a free engine. This sits among the earliest experiments in whether a downside could function as a deckbuilding hook rather than just a number to swallow. On its own it does almost nothing useful; the interest is entirely in what you pair with the counters, which is a fairly demanding ask for a five-mana 2/2.