SOLDIER Military Program
Two modest options at the start of combat: mint a 1/1, or grow up to two of your Soldiers by a +1/+1 counter each. Neither mode threatens to swing a game alone, and the "choose one" default prices the card as a reasonable roleplayer rather than an engine. The condition that reshapes the math is controlling a commander: that flips the ability from modal to cumulative, letting you take both lines every turn. A fresh Soldier arrives while two existing ones thicken, so the next combat finds a larger pool eligible for counters, and a slow trickle becomes a board that widens and grows at once. Because the counter mode does not use the word target, it reaches through hexproof and shroud, and because it names Soldiers specifically, it cannot splash into an unrelated go-wide shell; it rewards the very tokens the card itself produces, feeding its own loop. The design is an old white-weenie idea (an anthem-adjacent token maker) gated behind a permanent that only certain decks are built to guarantee, so the ceiling is deliberately locked away from the card's baseline. It reads as unassuming when read in isolation and compounds precisely in the shell it was engineered for, where the both-modes clause is not a rider but the entire point.
