Begin the Invasion

Battles were still a fresh card type when this arrived, and the design here is the tutor that treats an entire nascent type as fetchable resources rather than one-off threats. The full five-color pip cost is the ceiling: casting it means committing to all of white, blue, black, red, and green, so the payoff has to be commensurate, and it is. X is a raw count of battles, each with a different name, each entering already primed to be attacked and cracked for its reverse side. That last part is the wrinkle that separates this from a normal creature tutor: battles are not just permanents you assemble, they are a second layer of value waiting behind a defense counter, so putting several onto the battlefield at once floods the board with objectives your opponents must contend with before you ever flip them. The design bet is that the deckbuilding tax (a manabase that produces all five colors on the same turn you can afford a large X) is steep enough to pay for a search that fixes its own variance completely: up-to-X different names means no whiffing, no duplicates clogging the pull, just the exact battles you want deposited in one motion. It is a payoff card built for a type that had almost no dedicated support at the time, staking its power on the assumption that battles would only get better to search for.