Iron Monger, Sadistic Tycoon
Connive normally pays you off once: a creature loots (draws, then discards) and, if it pitched a nonland, grows by a counter, and the transaction ends there. This rewires that payoff into a swarm engine. Every time a creature you control connives, whether by its own ability or something you cast to grant it, this reads the event and pumps every Villain you control. That redirection is the whole design idea. The connive itself resolves as normal, banking its own counter, but the Villain tax means each looting event doubles as a board-wide anthem, so a deck stacked with Villains turns each round of card filtering into an escalating combat threat rather than a one-off quality shuffle. The 2/2 flyer that carries it is deliberately modest: the body exists to be a legal recipient of its own counters and to climb alongside the crew, not to close games on rate. What makes the ability scale is that the counter payout ignores the size of any individual connive: a creature that connives for one card triggers this exactly as hard as one that connives for several, since the payout scales only with how many Villains are on the battlefield when the trigger resolves. The reward lives entirely in creature-type density, which makes this a tribal counters lord wearing the clothes of a value flyer. It repays a build committed to the theme, not one merely dabbling in card selection.
