Sheriff of Safe Passage

A 0/0 base is the whole trick: worthless as a topdeck into an empty board, lethal as the reward for one you already built. It reads the rest of your team on the way in, placing counters equal to one plus every other creature you control, so the size it arrives at is a snapshot of how far ahead you already were. The counters land only once, as it enters, and they only ever sit on itself; there is no anthem here and no growth afterward. Plot is what converts that fragile payoff into a plan. Instead of casting it late into an established board and feeding a removal spell a fat target, you exile it early for a small tax, keep developing, and drop it for free on the turn your board is widest and your mana is open. The "enters with" language matters for the timing, too: this is a replacement effect, not a triggered ability, so the counters are baked into the creature before it hits play. There is no window between arrival and body for an opponent to respond to, no ability on the stack to answer. What is left is a clean deckbuilding question asked in a single card: how wide are you, and can you afford to get wider before this one lands? Answer it, and you deploy a large body for almost nothing; answer it wrong, and you have spent a card on a small Knight.