Tempered Veteran

For a single white mana and a tap, this feeds a counter only to a target already carrying one, which means the cheap mode is inert until something else on the battlefield has done the first turn of work. It cannot start the snowball, only accelerate it: a real deckbuilding tax dressed up as a bargain rate. The second ability exists to break that dependency, seeding a counter onto a bare creature to switch on the cheap mode next turn, but the cost is deliberately steep enough that you are not meant to lean on it. The design intent is a repeatable engine for a counters-matter shell rather than a standalone threat, and the fragile 1/2 body reflects that: a creature meant to sit back and tick counters upward, not trade in combat. Where a proliferate effect widens every existing counter across the board indiscriminately, this hands you targeted, single-counter precision at instant speed, letting you pump a blocker in response to combat math or push a creature across the exact threshold it needs to clear. That instant-speed flexibility is the payoff for the gating: the card rewards you for committing to the +1/+1 counter as a resource, then gives you fine control over where the next counter lands, one at a time, on your own schedule.