Waxmane Baku

Tapping creatures is rarely the win condition, and that ceiling is what keeps this 2/2 from warping a board harder than its body should. The engine runs on the tribal-spellcraft axis of its era: every Spirit or Arcane trigger banks a ki counter, which the Baku later converts into a scaling Falter effect. Spend a single counter to tap one attacker or blocker, or hoard them and clear an entire defensive line for an alpha strike. The mana on the activation is incidental; the counters are the true currency, which means the payoff exists only in a deck dense enough to feed it. That is the tension this design resolves: a reward that does nothing on an empty board but compounds quietly once the tribe shows up. The choice to tap rather than destroy is the load-bearing restriction. Tapping is temporary by definition: the creatures it touches untap on their controller's next turn, so the Baku buys a single combat step rather than permanently subtracting bodies. That distinction is exactly why the effect can scale with X without distorting the game; it bends one turn's combat math instead of dismantling a board. The 2/2 expects to be ignored and to work from the margins, accumulating threat instead of tempo. Among the cycle of Spirits that turn spellcraft triggers into a counter-fueled payoff, this is the one whose output reroutes combat rather than dealing damage or drawing cards: a recurring toll on the opponent's most important creatures, paid in patience.