Virtuous Variant

A 1/2 flyer whose entire payload is a single +1/+1 counter dropped on a creature you already control: the body wins races in the air but does little on the ground, so the card's value lives in where that counter lands. Send it to a creature with a counter-payoff, a menace threat trying to push damage through, or a mana dork you would rather see survive the next sweeper, and the arrival trigger does the connective work of a combat trick that never leaves the battlefield. Any creature you control is a legal target, so it slots comfortably into a proliferate shell or any build that cares about counters, without hard-requiring that theme to function. An evasive body plus a one-time buff is a fair floor rather than an engine: the counter is a single payment, not a repeatable spigot, and that ceiling is deliberate. Worth noting that the counter comes from arrival, not from a spell cast at the creature, so it does nothing for heroic-style triggers that key off being targeted; the enters trigger is the whole interaction. That framing rewards a board already worth improving over one assembled from nothing. It reads as glue: dependable in a deck invested in counters, forgettable in one that is not.