Skullbriar, the Walking Grave
Most counter-based creatures are renting their growth: kill them, exile them, blink them, and the counters vanish with the permanent they were sitting on, because counters belong to an object and a new object means a fresh start. The third line of text rewrites that rule for this Zombie. Whatever it accumulates stays glued to it through death, through exile, through a sacrifice and reanimation, through arriving on the battlefield from a graveyard or a face-down zone. The two zones that wipe the slate clean are hand and library, so a bounce spell or a tuck still resets it; everything else preserves the ledger. That distinction is the whole balancing act: removal that catches and releases (a kill spell answered by recursion, a blink, a board wipe followed by reanimation) is reduced to a tempo tax rather than a real answer, while the cheap, ubiquitous return-to-hand effect remains a genuine reset. The haste is the other half of the design: it lets the body start banking counters the turn it lands instead of telegraphing a slow build that invites the very removal that does work against it. Run it through proliferate, through a sacrifice-and-recur loop, through any doubling effect, and it snowballs into something that has to be answered with bounce, a tuck, or an effect that ignores counters outright. The usual toolkit of catch-and-release removal simply hands the growth back to you, larger each time.
