Harmonious Grovestrider

Green's habit of tying a creature's body to your land count runs back through designs like Molimo, Maro-Sorcerer and Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar, and the recurring problem with them is fragility: the payoff you spent turns assembling can vanish to a single instant, since one removal spell answers a huge body and a pile of investment in the same shot. Ward is aimed squarely at that soft spot. It leaves the arithmetic untouched: every land you drop is still a mana and a stat point, and the body swells naturally as the game goes long. What changes is the removal math. An opponent who wants to erase the creature has to find two extra mana at the precise moment they would rather be developing or holding up their own interaction, and that tax bites hardest against the tempo-sensitive spells a control deck wants to cast on curve. The design discipline is that the number is a toll, not a wall: a determined opponent can still pay through it, so the creature stays interactive rather than becoming a must-answer threat that answers itself. And because the thing arrives at five mana already as large as your land count, the Ward is protecting a real board presence from the moment it lands, not a fragile investment waiting to mature. A clean statement of green's late-game bookkeeping, with a guardrail bolted onto the part that used to fall over first.