Otterball Antics

Flashback and prowess rarely share a card, and the reason they usually do not is that flashback is a graveyard payoff while prowess wants a full hand of noncreature spells to feed it. This design threads both by making the graveyard cast pay off the token directly: cast it from hand and you get a base prowess body, cast it from the yard and the token arrives one counter larger, so the recursive half rewards you for having spent the spell already. The upshot is a two-for-one that spans the game rather than resolving all at once. Early, it is a chump-and-poke that grows when you fire off cheap spells; late, the flashback lets a single card populate the board twice, with the second Otter a 2/2 base before any prowess triggers stack on top. That escalating counter is what marks this as a spells-matter card: it wants you to hold it, use the front half to apply early pressure, then reload from the graveyard once your instants and sorceries are flowing. It is a modest rate on either cast, but the two casts are the point, and the growing body keeps the back half relevant deep into a game where a vanilla 1/1 would have long since stopped mattering.