Elven Ambush

The payoff and the enabler wear the same hat here, which is the whole tension. This is a token multiplier that scales off a board you may not have yet: with no Elves in play it makes nothing at all, four mana spent to draw zero bodies, a rate no green deck wants. It only earns its cost inside a tribe that has already committed Elves to the battlefield, where every dork and lord already down widens the count. The timing is where it pulls away from the green go-wide pack. Green's mass-token spells have historically leaned sorcery-speed, handing the pilot a board to swing with but no way to intervene during someone else's combat. This one holds up through the turn: it flashes in a wall of bodies to blunt an alpha strike, turning a race the opponent thought they had won into a stalled board mid-attack. The per-Elf clause is friction and reward folded into one line: it punishes the deck that splashes green for a single trick and pays the deck built around Llanowar-style bodies and Elvish lords. Note the direction of that dependency, though: because the count reads your current board, a sweeper that clears your Elves leaves the spell making nothing, so it wants to resolve while the tribe is intact, not as a rebuild afterward. Read plainly, it is the instant-speed swarm a dedicated Elf shell wants as a top-end burst, and dead weight anywhere else.