Invading Manticore

Six mana buys a 4/5 that also feeds two counters into your Army, and on an empty board that means the 4/5 arrives alongside a fresh 2/2 Zombie Army: a chunky body plus a down payment on a token that every subsequent amass source will keep growing. This common is the clearest demonstration of the arithmetic behind the mechanic, which pools go-wide reach onto one shared object rather than littering the board with individual tokens. The catch is baked into that design: because the accumulated counters all live on a single Army, one removal spell erases the entire investment at once. That single point of failure is the price amass pays for its efficiency, and it is what keeps stacking triggers onto one body from being strictly better than making separate creatures. As a piece of hardware the manticore does honest work; five toughness shrugs off most of the small red-zone damage that would otherwise trade with it. But its purpose is not to be built around. The trigger fires once, on entry, so this is not an engine so much as a no-strings deposit into the Army pool: the unfussy rate a common needs to make the counting habit stick.