Nurturer Initiate

The trigger fires on the cast, not the resolution, which matters more than it sounds: a green spell that gets countered still hands you the option to pay and pump, because the buff trigger is already on the stack and resolves independently of the spell that spawned it. That decoupling is the whole interest of the design. Each green cast queues up a separate trigger; you pay when that trigger resolves, and the +1/+1 lands at that point, not the instant the spell is announced. The practical effect is incremental: in a spell-dense green board, every dork, cantrip, and trick cast on your turn becomes a fresh chance to feed an attacker, and because the boosts resolve before combat math is locked, you can size a creature past a blocker or push lethal after the opponent has committed. The lineage here is the cast-trigger creature that converts spell volume into stats, and a one-mana version sits near the bottom of that cost curve. The tax is what keeps the body honest: a 1/1 with a per-trigger mana cost asks for a board flooded with green spells before it produces a boost you would notice, and contributes nothing on a turn with no green casts to ride. Decks dense enough to power it are usually winning by other means, which leaves this as a go-wide spells-matter role-player and filler everywhere else.