Pensive Professor

The Increment trigger reads like a treadmill: it fires only when the mana you spent exceeds this creature's power or toughness, so every counter it earns makes the next spell harder to qualify. Because the check clears the lower of the two stats, the 0/2 body is more forgiving than it looks; a two-mana spell already beats the zero power, so early on the engine hums along, then slows as power climbs past your usual curve. What makes the design worth studying is the pairing: the second ability turns any counter, from any source, into a drawn card. Increment is the built-in supply, but the creature does not care where the counter comes from. That decoupling is the real hook. On its own it is a value spigot that taxes itself as it grows. Wire it into anything that hands out +1/+1 counters (proliferate, repeatable counter engines, cards that dole out counters for free) and the self-limiting clock stops mattering, because the draw trigger keys off the counter, not off the spell that cleared the threshold. It is a growth payoff wearing the costume of one, and a card-draw payoff underneath: the two abilities pull against each other on purpose, one asking you to spend big, the other asking only that a counter land.