Wildwood Scourge

Most Hydras scale once, on the way in, then settle in as a fat body. This one keeps a second growth engine running, but the mechanism matters more than the fact of it. The entry ability is the familiar green X-Hydra template, sizing the body to the mana you sink into it, so drawn late it can still land as an enormous threat off raw alone. What follows is a ticker: whenever counters land on another non-Hydra creature you control, this gets a single counter, no matter how many were placed in that event. That distinction is the whole design. It is not copying stacks; it advances one step per triggering event, so the payoff scales with the frequency of counter placement across your board, not the magnitude of any one buff. A deck that sprinkles small counters onto many creatures over many turns feeds it far better than one that dumps a pile onto a single target. The non-Hydra clause is the leash: a stack of these cannot pump one another into an unbounded loop, so the growth has to come from elsewhere on the battlefield. That makes it a finisher rather than a self-contained engine, best deployed on top of a running counters machine, where all those incremental one-counter interactions finally aggregate into something lethal. It belongs to the green tradition of counters cards that reward assembling the parts first and dropping the aggregator last.