Bakersbane Duo

Expend is the mechanic that ties a creature's growth to how much mana you've already burned this turn, and this one wires that reward straight into the combat step. The Food token on entry is the down payment: a 2/2 that immediately banks a sacrifice-fodder-and-lifegain hook and asks nothing in return. The real design work is in the expend trigger, which fires the moment you spend your fourth total mana casting spells in a turn. That single threshold reframes what a green two-drop is doing on turn four and beyond: it stops being a body you've curved past and becomes a creature that gets a touch bigger as the rest of your hand empties, an incremental buff riding on tempo you were spending anyway. The important wrinkle is that expend counts cumulative mana across the whole turn rather than per-spell, so a curve-out that chains cheap spells will cross the line as reliably as one expensive play, and it costs you nothing extra to trigger. Because a player only spends their fourth mana once per turn, the +1/+1 arrives exactly once: there is no stacking it, no doubling up, no reason to hold spells past the trigger. It is a small effect built to reward the exact play pattern green midrange already wants (deploy early, keep casting), the kind of low-stakes reward that makes a modest attacker slightly better without ever asking you to change your line.