Arsenal Thresher

The reveal here is the whole trick: you show artifacts from hand without spending or committing them, and they walk right back into your grip after the counters land. That separates the payoff from the cost in a way most "scales with your board" creatures cannot manage. A typical anthem or convoke effect taxes your battlefield; this one taxes only your willingness to flash a hand of artifacts you fully intend to cast later. In a deck dense enough to keep three or four artifact cards in hand on the turn it lands, the 2/2 base becomes a 5/5 or 6/6 with nothing else lost, which is an aggressive rate for the era this kind of front-loaded body comes from. The catch sits in the counters themselves: the bonus is fixed at the moment it enters, so a slow start or an empty hand leaves you with a vanilla blocker, and the card rewards drawing it after you have stockpiled rather than as your opening play. The Esper color identity is doing the framing work, marking it as an artifact-matters payoff that asks you to build around it rather than splash it. It is a construct that wants to arrive late to a board it has been quietly preparing for, and it pays exactly as much as the hand you reveal lets it.