Emblazoned Golem

Kicker built a payment puzzle into the rate. The X here is bounded not by mana but by color identity: each pip of growth costs one mana of a different color, with no doubling up, so the most counters this Golem can ever wear is five, and earning all five means casting it in a deck that produces every color of mana. That constraint inverts the usual artifact promise. Golems and colorless creatures are normally the glue that holds a two-color or splash-heavy deck together precisely because they ask for nothing; this one rewards you for the opposite, scaling exactly with how greedy your manabase already is. A two-color deck gets a 3/4 at best; a five-color deck gets a 6/7. The body it starts from is small, which is the honest part of the bargain: you pay for the size in color discipline, turn by turn, with the colors you actually have access to when you cast it. As a design artifact it sits squarely in Apocalypse's preoccupation with multicolor as a resource to be hoarded rather than a cost to be managed, a set that spent its whole identity rewarding players for stretching across the color pie instead of penalizing them for it.