Repeat Offender

Most creatures pick up suspect once, from an outside spell or ability, and then carry the drawback indefinitely: menace on offense, a body locked out of blocking on defense. This one owns the switch. Its activated ability reads its own state and branches: already suspected, and the mana buys a +1/+1 counter; not suspected, and the mana suspects it. That self-reference is what makes the whole thing tick. Suspect stops being a static handicap pinned on the creature by someone else and becomes the toggle at the front of a repeatable pump: pay once to arm it (accepting the can't-block penalty in exchange for evasion), then pay again and again to grow. The cost of running it this way is legibility. A 2/1 that has volunteered to lose its ability to block and gained menace is broadcasting exactly what it means to do, and the mana to make it threatening comes in slow enough increments that a removal spell answers it cleanly before the counters pile up. What repays a closer look is how it internalizes a keyword usually handed out by other cards, folding the penalty and the payoff into one line so the creature suspects itself on purpose and profits from the state it chose to enter.