Ratchet Bomb is a sweeper that can take down more expensive things the more counters it has, and Magistrates Scepter is a potentially repeatable Time Walk effect
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With Acid Trap Hole, you can target one of your opponents set monsters and destroy it, but only if its defense is 2000 or less
And then modal DFCs were introduced with Zendikar Rising
When paired with white, you start games off with the best suite of two-drop creatures in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms
All of this is to say that Oko is extremely hard to answer in combat, so it largely requires a spell to deal with it (or, as we see in Throne of Eldraine Standard, you can go way over the top of its threat generation by, for example, making lots of 2/2s with Field of the Dead)