Oran-Rief Survivalist

The Ally tribe lives or dies on density, and this is the payoff built to reward stacking creatures rather than spreading effects across a curve. The trigger fires on this creature's own entry plus every Ally that follows, so it enters as a 1/1 for two whose own trigger can lift it to 2/2, and it grows from there: each new Ally is a free +1/+1 retroactively credited to the body already down. The optional wording is a quiet courtesy: the "may" lets you decline the trigger if a future effect would punish you for sitting under counters, but the counter never targets, it simply goes on this creature when something else enters. The asymmetry that disciplines the design is that the engine pays the runner, not the latecomers. Play it early and every Ally afterward feeds it; play it late and most of the Allies that would have grown it are already on the board doing nothing for it. That front-loaded reward is the whole reason a two-mana 1/1 reads as a build-around rather than a body, because it asks you to sequence the tribe correctly: lead with the engine, then chain the payoffs behind it. Without the supporting count it is a serviceable two-drop and nothing more. With a real Ally base it is the cheapest way to convert tribal commitment into a clock that climbs every time you add to the board.