Shed Weakness

A combat trick built for a world where creatures come attached to shrinking counters. The base mode is straightforward: a one-mana +2/+2 at instant speed, the sort of pump that upgrades a losing block or forces damage through an open lane. The counter-removal rider is what makes the card interesting, because in a deck seeded with -1/-1 counters those two lines want to fire together. A creature reduced to a shadow of itself by a counter comes back to full size the moment the counter falls off, then gets the pump stacked on top, and the resulting jump in size is wide enough to reverse a combat that already looked settled. The optional "may" wording matters here: with no counter present, the removal simply does nothing, so the card never becomes a dead draw when you just want cheap green muscle. The payoff belongs to the player tracking which creature is carrying a counter it would rather not, since both effects land on the same body in a single beat. Away from a counters environment, the second clause is inert text, an accepted cost for the flexibility: a narrow bonus grafted onto a floor that pulls honest weight without it.