Aven Warhawk

Amplify was Legions' bet that a tribal-matters mechanic could scale with your hand rather than the board, and this is the version that put the count where birds and soldiers overlap. Five mana for a flyer that starts as a 2/2 looks like a tax until you read the entry condition: every Bird and Soldier card you reveal stacks a +1/+1 counter on it, and a deck built around either type tends to be holding several. The wrinkle is that amplify rewards a full grip, which sits in direct tension with playing your creatures out: the more soldiers you have already deployed, the smaller this one arrives. That is the cost the design charges for an uncapped ceiling. It also means the card is at its most explosive when cast early off a hand full of unplayed tribal cards, then shrinks as the game goes long, an inversion of the usual late-game scaling curve. Onslaught-block tribal was the home for it, where two of the format's deepest creature types intersected on a single body and a flier could carry a counter pile over the ground stall. The mechanic asked you to weigh information (showing your hand) against tempo (keeping cards back), a trade that never quite became a constructed staple but defined how amplify creatures wanted to be sequenced.