Retrieval Agent

The 2/5 body is the whole design brief here: a wall that blocks all day and asks for nothing to do it. What the activated ability adds is a pressure valve on that toughness. Paying two mana to shift it to a 3/4 is not an aggressive move so much as a controlled bleed, letting the creature climb through blockers or over a lethal race by spending its own durability. Because the modifier is +1/-1 and stacks, each point of power costs a point of the toughness that made the body worth playing, so the sink is self-limiting rather than open-ended: four activations turn the wall into a 6/1, and the fifth reduces its toughness to zero and kills it. That inversion (spending mana to make a defensive creature progressively more offensive and more fragile in the same motion) is where the interesting math lives. It is a mana sink attached to a body that already justifies its slot without one, which means the ability is upside you reach for late, when the extra mana would otherwise sit idle and a few points of unblocked damage matter more than a wall you no longer need. A patient, unflashy piece of curve-filling, built for the deck that wants a brick early and a slow, self-consuming beater once the game has stalled.