Elvish Hydromancer

The whole card is a wager on the kicker. Cast as a plain 3/2, it is a warm body and nothing more, a deliberately thin floor that exists so you never have to strand the card when the mana or the target isn't there; the design pours every point of value into the payoff and prices it accordingly. Pay the additional and its entry clones any creature you already control, which is where the ceiling detaches from anything printed on the Hydromancer itself. The copy is only as good as what you aim it at: point it at a mana dork and you've ramped, point it at a bomb carrying its own enters-the-battlefield trigger and you've stacked that trigger a second time, point it at something wearing an aura or a +1/+1 counter and you get the base creature only, none of the accessories. The Simic split is load-bearing. Green supplies the cheap early Elf and the ramp creatures worth duplicating; blue supplies the "make another of that" effect green rarely earns on its own. The consequence is a card that wants a board in place before it graduates from filler to engine: hollow on turn three, dangerous once you've committed something worth photocopying. That sequencing demand is the honest cost of the ceiling, and the vanilla mode is the release valve that keeps the wager from ever being dead weight in hand.