Spellgorger Weird

The oldest payoff shape in spellslinger, drawn in the cleanest possible ink: a body that gains a permanent +1/+1 counter every time you cast a noncreature spell. Not just instants and sorceries: an artifact, an enchantment, or a planeswalker feeds it too, which widens the net of what counts as fuel well past the burn-and-cantrip package the archetype usually runs on. That template traces back to designs like Kiln Fiend, but where those pumped only until end of turn, the counters here stick. That single distinction separates a one-turn combat trick from a threat that accrues. Cast three cheap spells across as many turns and the 2/2 quietly becomes a 5/5 that stays that way; the growth banks rather than resetting, so an opponent who ignores it wakes up facing a body that no longer trades with anything they were holding. The trigger fires on the cast, not the resolution of the spell, so even a spell that gets countered still leaves the growth trigger on the stack to resolve: the fuel counts regardless of whether the spell it was attached to ever does anything. The tension is in the color pairing it implies. Red hands you the cheap spells but few ways to protect the creature, leaving it a slow-cooking finisher that needs a shell willing to babysit it. Point removal answers it clean before the counters pile up, which is what you pay for stapling the payoff to a fragile three-drop rather than an enchantment or a hexproof creature.