Pileated Provisioner

Look closely at the "without flying" restriction, because it is the entire point of the design. A flyer that hands out a +1/+1 counter would be forgettable; a flyer that can put the counter on anything except another creature with flying is a deliberate rule about where the reward is allowed to land. The Bird can never grow itself and can never stack a counter onto a second evasive threat, so the effect is forced downward, onto the ground creatures a five-mana white support piece is meant to prop up. The clause reads as flavor (the provisioner tends the earthbound rather than its own kind) but it works as a governor, keeping the card from snowballing an already-hard-to-block board and instead asking it to make a stuck attacker matter. The counter itself does the durable work counters always do: it survives the removal that resets a pump spell and turns a chump blocker into something that trades up. What you actually get, then, is a 3/4 body paying rent in the air while quietly upgrading whatever is grounded beneath it, a support card wearing a beater's frame. One wrinkle: the enters trigger targets, so it needs a legal grounded creature to resolve fully. With an empty board or an all-flying board, the ability has nowhere to go, and you are simply buying a flyer.