Empyrial Storm

The reward structure reads like a wager placed on your own recklessness. The floor is honest but unremarkable: a single 4/4 flier for six mana, a rate that would embarrass most white top-ends. What the card actually asks is that you have already been paying the commander tax, recasting your general from the command zone time after time, and that each of those recasts becomes a stored charge waiting to detonate. Cast your commander four times, then fire this off, and the copy-on-cast trigger builds an angelic swarm proportional to how much you have bled into the command zone already. That is the quiet cleverness: it converts a resource most decks treat as pure friction (the escalating tax on a commander that keeps dying) into a scaling payoff. Note the timing precisely. The copies come from the cast trigger, so they resolve before the spell itself does; countering Empyrial Storm on the stack no longer stops the tokens once the trigger has gone off. It rewards a specific kind of deck, one built around a cheap, sacrificial, or repeatedly-slain commander rather than a durable one you leave on the battlefield, and it punishes the opposite. Left uncast for too long in a game where your commander has sat safely in play after a single cast, it does almost nothing but hand you two Angels and a shrug.