Novijen Sages

Graft's whole conceit is that the counters are not glued to the body that brought them: they migrate, one at a time, onto whatever creature enters next. Most of the mechanic's payoffs were about distributing stats around the board. This one closes the loop differently, turning the counters back into resources before they ever finish doing their combat job. The repeatable ability lets you cash any two +1/+1 counters from across your board for a card, which means the four counters this enters with are not a body so much as a starting balance of two draws, redeemable on your schedule. That reframes the graft pool as a slow card-advantage engine rather than a way to pad a token's toughness. The tension is that drawing eats the counters, and a 0/0 that has spent its counters is back to being a 0/0: every card you draw shrinks the creature you drew it from, including the Sages itself. It rewards a board where counters keep arriving (from graft triggers, from other counter sources) faster than you spend them, so the engine never runs dry. Among graft cards, this is the one that points the counters at the hand instead of the battlefield, treating them as fuel to refill rather than stats to spread, and that single repurposing reshapes what the keyword is even for.