Veteran Charger

A modest 2/2 that pays for itself twice: once as a body, once as a permanent upgrade stapled onto a creature you have not cast yet. The chosen card in hand gains +2/+2 that behaves nothing like a counter, an aura, or a pump spell. It rewrites the creature's printed baseline, and it stays rewritten through every bounce, kill, discard, and shuffle that would strip an equipment or dissolve an enchantment. That permanence is the reason perpetual exists as its own keyword rather than a repackaging of some older buff: the effect follows the card between zones, an interaction that a format built strictly on printed rules cannot replicate. The design wrinkle worth flagging is the chosen card's location. Because the buff lands on a card in hand, not a permanent on the battlefield, the Charger front-loads value onto a threat that has not arrived, so it wants you holding something worth improving when it enters. That makes it a two-card investment resolving as one oversized creature later, a curve-smoothing tool more than an immediate board presence. The payoff comes when the upgraded creature dies, gets drawn again from a reshuffled library, and shows up still carrying its +2/+2. A green three-drop with an unremarkable body becomes the plainest demonstration of what tethering a stat boost to the card itself, rather than to any object on the battlefield, actually buys.