A.I.M. Scientists

Two abilities that pull in opposite directions, stapled onto one 3/3 body. The connive trigger wants you to keep the card and cast it: the discard is the engine, and pitching a nonland grows the creature while you dig toward a threat. Basic landcycling wants the exact opposite, pitching the whole card early to fix a stumbling manabase and treating a four-mana creature as a two-mana basic tutor when the hand is short on colors. That tension is the entire pitch of a cycling creature that also does work in play. Most cyclers ask a binary question (cast it or cycle it), and the answer is usually clear from your hand. This one blurs the line by making the on-board mode genuinely rewarding: the enters-the-battlefield connive smooths a draw, and the +1/+1 counter is contingent, arriving only when the card you toss is a nonland, so the smoothing and the growth are the same decision. The landcycling clause exists to keep it from ever being dead: short on basics of the right color, or holding it in a late grip where a body does nothing, you convert it into the land you missed. It is a design that hedges against its own worst draws, which is why cards built this way keep showing up in decks that value never having stranded cards over any single line the card can take.