Ant Queen

A mana sink with a body that already justifies the five it costs. The trick to evaluating a card like this is asking what happens when the rest of your hand runs out: the 5/5 has already traded with most ground threats, and from there every two mana you draw becomes another blocker, another point of attrition, another body to throw at a planeswalker. The cost on the token ability is deliberately steep enough that the Queen never floods the board in a single turn the way a free-spawning engine would; it meters the production at one token per untapped pair of lands, which keeps the card from snowballing out of a fair game while still rewarding a long one. That makes it a different animal from the go-wide token producers that dump bodies all at once: this is incremental insurance, the kind that turns flooded draws into a real plan. The Insect typing has rarely amounted to a tribe worth supporting, so the tokens read mostly as generic green creatures: chump blockers, sacrifice fodder, fuel for anything that counts or eats your own creatures. What endures is the shape, a self-contained creature that is a threat on turn five and a grindy resource engine for every turn after, with no second card required to make the engine run.