Duel for Dominance

Green's fights buy their instant-speed reach with a catch, and the catch here is a synergy tax: the +1/+1 counter that turns a losing trade into a winning one only lands if you control three or more creatures whose powers are all different from one another. That condition works two ways at once. It gates the pump behind a board green already wants to assemble (a spread of bodies at varied power values rather than a stack of identical tokens), and it keeps the fight itself as the floor: even without coven, you still have a two-mana instant that trades your creature into theirs. The bump is the difference between a fair swap and a favorable one, letting a smaller attacker punch up into a bigger blocker and walk away. The requirement rewards range of size over raw headcount (duplicates are fine as long as three distinct powers exist among them), and the reason it rarely reads as a hoop is that green tends toward a ragged, uneven board anyway. The timing sharpens the appeal: at instant speed the counter can drop mid-combat, ambushing an attacker or blocker who committed while the math still looked safe on their side.