Strangleroot Geist

Two green for a two-power hasty body that has to be killed twice is aggressive math that should not balance as cleanly as it does. Undying is what makes the beatdown relentless: a removal spell or a chump-and-trade does not net the defender tempo, because the creature comes right back the moment it dies, returning to the battlefield as a 3/2 in the same breath. The cost of that exchange falls on whoever blinked first. The trick is in the counter itself, which is both the reward and the off-switch. Undying fires only on a creature with no +1/+1 counters, so the second life is also the last; anything that puts a +1/+1 counter on it (an outlast effect, a proliferate trigger, a counter from another permanent) seals the engine shut, while a straight power pump like Giant Growth leaves the recursion intact. The card asks an attacker to spend its resilience exactly once. That tension between haste pressuring the board immediately and undying refusing to let the board clear is the whole appeal: a two-drop that wants to be removed and punishes the removal, sitting in the lineage of creatures that tax interaction by surviving it. Pairing haste with undying is deliberate, since the recursion matters most to a deck applying constant pressure, where every turn the body is not attacking is a turn the clock slips. For sacrifice shells the counter rider is a different tool: one free reuse before the engine locks, but the card was built first as a beater that does not stay dead.