Razorfin Abolisher

The conditional is the whole design: the ability can only return a creature that already carries a counter, and that gate decides whether the wizard does anything at all. Without a counter-bearing creature on the board, the activation has no legal target and cannot go on the stack; the tap stays locked until a counter has landed somewhere, whether you placed it or your opponent did. The restriction narrows further than "counter" suggests, since the target must be a creature: a planeswalker, artifact, or land carrying counters is off-limits no matter how many it has accumulated. Pair the wizard with anything that distributes counters reliably (a Wither source leaving -1/-1 counters as it deals damage, a steady supply of +1/+1s, a leveler that grows under its own marker) and the bounce becomes dependable; against an uncountered board, it sits inert. The bounce mode carries its own wrinkles, resetting enters-the-battlefield triggers and erasing any counter-based growth, but it never permanently answers a threat the way exile or destruction would. What it offers instead is a repeatable tempo lever an opponent has to play around the moment they commit a counter-bearing creature. The activation cost stacks on top of the body's price, so the card demands real investment before it produces value, which is what keeps a creature capable of looping a board into perpetual repetition from coming online for free. This is a build-around for a counters shell, and it reads exactly as narrowly as that sounds.