Illustrious Wanderglyph
Ascend, unlike most conditional payoffs, is a one-way latch: cross ten permanents once and the city's blessing stays lit for the rest of the game, even if your board is later stripped. This Golem is built to exploit that. Every upkeep (yours and each opponent's) it manufactures a Gnome, so the token drip is really about getting over the threshold once rather than holding above it forever. Once the blessing lands, your other artifact creatures swell by +2/+2, and that includes the Gnomes the card has been printing all along: a stalled game where nobody removes it quietly turns each 1/1 into a 3/3 the moment the count tips. The 2/2 frame is deliberately modest, because this is not a creature that wants to attack; it wants to sit as a passive factory raising the floor on a wide, artifact-heavy board while the anthem waits for the permanent count to catch up. That is the exact deck Ascend has always favored: many cheap permanents rather than a few expensive ones. What ties the two abilities together is the shared dependence on the same number, ten permanents, which the token engine feeds toward and the anthem cashes in once it arrives.
