Ludevic's Test Subject // Ludevic's Abomination

A payoff buried five activations deep, with a clock measured in turns rather than triggers. The front face is a 0/3 wall with no offense and no urgency: an incubating specimen that asks for at a time on a creature that contributes nothing until it hatches. The flip is a slow-build countdown, and that pacing is the whole design. Each activation buys a single hatchling counter, so crossing the five-counter threshold takes five separate activations and ten total mana, which in practice is spread across multiple turns, at which point the egg sheds its Defender husk and becomes the 13/13 trampler on the back. The cost is deliberately ungrabbable: you cannot rush it with a single big payment, only commit to it activation after activation, which makes it a mana sink that doubles as a finisher for a deck with nothing better to do with its blue. The double-faced framing dramatizes the experiment, a specimen that outgrows its container, and the transformation is permanent once it lands. The tax of getting there is what balances such an oversized body: holding up a do-nothing blocker while feeding it ten mana over several turns is a tempo cost few proactive shells can absorb, which is why the Abomination belongs to slow, controlling builds patient enough to protect the egg long enough to let it cook.