Tributary Instructor

Mentor and counter-payoff usually live in different decks: Mentor wants a wide, staggered board so there's always a smaller attacker to feed, while cards that reward counters tend to sit in slower, +1/+1-matters shells. This Merfolk stitches the two together in one body. The attack trigger seeds a counter onto a lesser-powered attacker, and the second ability turns every counter-bearing creature into a card the moment it dies. That death-triggered draw reframes what a Mentor counter is worth: normally the +1/+1 is pure combat math, a way to push through a point or survive a block, but here the counter also converts into a replacement card when the creature trades or gets sacrificed. The synergy runs in one direction, since the counters this creature hands out are exactly the fuel its own draw clause needs, so a counter placed for tempo is never wasted even when the creature it landed on dies in combat. It rewards a go-wide plan that expects to lose creatures rather than protect them, which sits at an odd angle to how counter decks usually want to preserve their invested threats. The 4/4 body is large enough to trigger Mentor on most of a token board, and the draw does not care whether the counter came from this card, so any counter source in the deck feeds it.