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Moxonomy

Hundred-Battle Veteran

Creature — Zombie Warrior3 generic manaBlack mana

A four-mana 4/2 asks nothing of you when it hits the battlefield; a four-mana 6/6 that recurs itself once demands a whole deckbuilding thesis. The gap between those two bodies is the counter-diversity clause, which turns on only when three distinct kinds of counters sit across your creatures at once: not three counters, three kinds, so a lone +1/+1 army does nothing here. That pushes you toward a board that traffics in variety (charge, stun, oil, flying, whatever the set gives you), the exact opposite of the go-wide sameness most aggressive black decks reward. The payoff for meeting that condition is a body that swings the vertical toughness bump the hardest, going from an easily-traded 4/2 into a genuine bulk that shrugs off the small removal that would otherwise pick it off.

The graveyard recast is the safety net that keeps the whole enterprise from collapsing when the first copy trades. Casting it a second time stamps a finality counter on the way in, which does double duty: it exiles the creature on its next death so the loop is strictly one-shot, and, more slyly, it is a counter, so the recast body can help satisfy its own diversity requirement while contributing to it for everything else. That self-referential wrinkle is the cleverest thing on the card: the mechanic that limits the recursion is also, technically, a piece of the engine the recursion is built to feed.

Hundred-Battle Veteran (tdm)
TDM · #82uncommon
Pricing
Normal: $0.06
Foil: $0.06
Oracle Text

Rules text

As long as there are three or more different kinds of counters among creatures you control, this creature gets +2/+4. You may cast this card from your graveyard. If you do, it enters with a finality counter on it. (If a creature with a finality counter on it would die, exile it instead.)
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
Legal
Pioneer
Legal
Modern
Legal
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
N/A
Brawl
Legal
Historic
Legal
Alchemy
Legal
Timeless
Legal
Standard Brawl
Legal
More formats
Old School
N/A
Premodern
N/A
PreDH
N/A
Pauper Commander
N/A
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
Legal
Penny Dreadful
N/A
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
Legal
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
Legal
TLR
N/A
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