Predation Steward

Oil counters were the era's attempt to bottle proliferate synergy into a single stored resource, and here that shows up in its plainest form: a body that arrives with two charges and spends them, one at a time, to hand out a temporary +2/+2. The sorcery-speed clamp is doing the real limiting work. A pump that could fire on the opponent's attack or as a combat trick would rewrite how blocks resolve; restricting it to your own main phase turns it into a slow, predictable growth engine rather than a reactive threat, and it means each activation is announced well before it matters. The two counters cap the card at two uses on its own, but proliferate strategies can top them back up, which is the connective tissue that ties it into the counter-matters shell it was built for. Standing alone it is a modest attacker with a capped pump ability that occasionally makes another creature bigger during your turn; inside a deck that treats oil as a currency to be multiplied, it becomes a repeatable source of stat inflation whose only real cost is tapping and the mana. That distance between the standalone rate and the synergy payoff explains why it sits at common: it needs the ecosystem around it to look like anything more than a filler beater.