Earthen Arms

The clean expression of what awaken was built to do: take a spell whose early-game effect is unremarkable and graft a late-game land animation onto the same card, so the slot earns its keep in both halves of a game. The cheap mode hands two +1/+1 counters to any permanent, which reads thin until you remember the targets that actually want counters: a creature on a counters-matters plan, anything with a sacrifice-fueled growth ability, a body you need to push past a blocker. The awaken cost is where the design lives. Pay seven and the spell animates one of your own lands into a 0/0 Elemental with haste, and because the awaken counters and the spell's main effect can both land on that same target, you get six +1/+1 counters on it: a 6/6 that can attack the moment it resolves. The land-still-a-land clause is the wrinkle that makes the manabase do double duty, since the animated permanent keeps tapping for mana and the conversion never actually costs you a land's worth of fixing. The flip side is that you have turned a land into a creature, which means a board wipe now catches it the way it catches everything else: the upside of building your threat out of a land you already control is paid for by handing that threat to the same sweepers your other creatures fear. It is a flexible-by-cost design rather than a flexible-by-mode one, and the gap between the two-mana floor and the seven-mana ceiling is the whole point.