Reluctant Dounguard

Cast into an empty battlefield, it lands as a 2/2 that promises more than it can show: the printed 4/4 sits behind two -1/-1 counters, released only as your board fills out. Each other creature you control peels one counter away, so the card turns white's natural urge to flood the board into a second dividend, paying you for the exact sequencing a token or weenie deck already wants. It is priced like an efficient beater but plays like a build-around, and those counters are what keep the two-power body from being just another commodity three-drop. The recovery clause is worth reading carefully, because it rewards width in a single turn rather than tempo over several: the trigger fires on every other creature that enters, so a token-making spell or a mass reanimation can strip both counters at once and hand you a 4/4 the same turn it arrived. Once it is back to full, the ability idles: nothing short of another -1/-1 counter landing on it (from a Wither or Infect source, or an outside effect) can re-arm the removal trigger, so the body cannot snowball past its printed line. That is the deliberate ceiling in the design. The tension between size-as-printed and size-as-realized is the whole idea, and the escrowed rate is what turns an aggressive three-drop into a payoff for the go-wide plan it was cut to serve.