Nesting Dovehawk

Populate has always carried a chicken-and-egg problem: it copies a creature token you already control, so a deck leaning on it needs a separate engine just to produce the first token worth duplicating. This design stitches the trigger and the payoff into one body. The combat-step populate wants tokens to feed on, and the counter clause turns every creature token that enters (from the populate itself, or from anywhere else) into growth on the bird. Because populate creating a copy is itself a token entering, the card fattens off its own trigger before combat damage is dealt, and every additional token-maker in the deck compounds into it. That coupling closes a loop populate alone never could: the counter reward gives you a reason to keep spilling tokens even on the turns your populate finds nothing better to copy than the last creature it already made. The 2/2 flying frame is deliberately modest; this is priced as an engine that starts small and expects a wide board to feed it, not as a standalone threat. It answers a question the mechanic left open for a decade: what does populate look like when the card doing it also cares that you did.