Willow Geist

Graveyard payoffs almost always reward filling the yard; this one rewards emptying it. The trigger keys off cards leaving your graveyard, which inverts the usual delve-and-dredge economy: the same flashback spell, escape creature, or exile-from-graveyard effect that normally spends a resource pays a growth dividend on the side. A one-mana body that scales this way asks for a deck already built around graveyard churn, where the counters accumulate as a byproduct of doing what you were going to do anyway rather than as a line you have to commit to. Trample is not a throwaway keyword here: once the counters stack, it turns a body that would otherwise be chump-blocked into a genuine clock. The death trigger closes the loop by returning a chunk of life equal to whatever the creature has grown into, so removing it late costs the opponent more the longer they wait, and the bigger it has gotten the larger that swing. It sits in a narrow band of green design where the graveyard is a working resource rather than a dumping ground, and it stands out as a payoff that fires on the exit rather than the entry.