Bold Biochemist

A 1/3 body that would rather block than swing hides a card-draw button with an unusually specific fuse. The activation prints as six mana for a +1/+1 counter and two cards, but the parenthetical shaves the creature's own cost off the top if it entered the battlefield this turn, and because the reduction tracks the mana cost () rather than the mana value, the colored pip goes too. Land the two-drop on a turn with mana to spare and the discounted activation comes to exactly generic, no blue required, fired the same turn before the discount evaporates. That timing is the whole design intent: it pays you to deploy the body and cash in the instant it arrives rather than sit on the option indefinitely. The one-shot clause is the other half of the leash. This is not the repeatable card-advantage faucet that grinds games into oblivion; it is a single burst, gated behind a defensive body while you assemble the mana. What you are buying is a creature that plants a flag early and threatens to convert a chunk of mana into two cards and a slightly larger blocker on the turn you commit. The keyword frames a creature's late-game relevance around a costly, once-per-ability payoff; here the payoff is the most fundamental resource in the game, which is what makes the enter-this-turn window the decision the card is actually built around.