Dark Depths

Thirty mana over ten activations, paid three at a time, is a clock no deck would ever run on the card's own terms. The design tension is the gap between that absurd grind and the prize on the other side: an indestructible flying 20/20 that ends almost any game it survives a turn into. The entire archetype that grew around this land is an exercise in skipping the ten counters altogether. The token is created by a state trigger, not by paying down the counters: when Dark Depths has no ice counters on it, you sacrifice it and Marit Lage appears. So the trick is to reach an empty land without burning through the cost. Thespian's Stage does it by becoming a copy of Dark Depths with zero ice counters, and the state trigger sees a counter-free land and hands over the avatar at once. The classic alternative uses Vampire Hexmage, which sacrifices itself to remove all ten counters in a single shot, satisfying the same empty-land condition. The counters, in other words, are not a price to grind down but a state to be reached, an unusual axis to build a land around.

What makes the payoff load-bearing is the token's text closing every door at once: indestructible answers most removal, flying clears most blockers, and twenty power finishes the game in a swing. The land itself is just the price of admission, and everything interesting about it lives in how cheaply that admission gets dodged.