Anax, Hardened in the Forge

Two design ideas that usually live in separate decks share a body here, and the collision is the point. Devotion wants you to flood the board with red pips and keep permanents on the table; sacrifice-payoff wants creatures to die. The death trigger reconciles them, but only within a tight window: it fires when Anax or another nontoken creature you control dies, so the payoff attaches specifically to your hard-cast bodies, not to the tokens they leave behind. That restriction matters, because those Satyrs will not replace themselves, and it keeps the engine from spiraling into a token-recursion loop. The power-4-or-greater clause pushes the incentive toward bigger creatures rather than a swarm of chaff, which is unusual for a token generator that ordinarily prefers cheap fodder; here you are rewarded for running threats worth blocking. The tokens do not feed devotion (that counts red symbols in permanents' mana costs, and a 1/1 token prints none), so the count rests on whatever hard-cast creatures survive, and Anax's own power rises and falls with it. The fixed toughness of 3 is the only stable part of the body, which means the card whiffs as a blocker in a splash and swings for real damage in a committed mono-red shell. And the tokens themselves cannot block, quietly locking the whole package into the aggressive column: this is a demigod built to punish trades, handing back a growing offense every time a nontoken creature of yours goes to the graveyard.