Gaea's Might

Domain is the mechanic that asks your manabase to pay for your spells twice: once for the mana, and again by demanding diversity in what produces it. Here the reward scales from a modest +1/+1 in a mono-green deck up to a backbreaking +5/+5 when your lands cover the full spread of basic land types. That ceiling is the whole reason the card exists, and it is also the reason it mostly stayed a multicolor curiosity: one green mana buys an unconditional combat trick, but the green deck that wants combat tricks is usually the one least equipped to splash Plains, Island, Swamp, and Mountain into its mana. The tension is deliberate, a build-your-own-rate puzzle in the way Domain cards trade. What separates this one from its peers is the rate per mana when the count is wide: at the top end it dwarfs the era's standard +3/+3 effects for a fraction of the cost. The card punishes you for the manabase you actually built and rewards the one you rarely can, which is exactly the bargain that early multicolor design wanted players to keep weighing.