Lunar Avenger
Seven generic mana for a 2/2 is the most punishing baseline Sunburst ever asked you to swallow, and that floor is the entire pitch: the body scales only with the colored mana you feed into its generic cost. Pay even a single colored source and you get a counter plus an engine; pay all five and it lands as a 7/7 sitting on a stockpile of counters it can spend. That conversion is the mechanism worth studying. Most Sunburst cards bank their counters into raw stats and leave them there; this one turns the entire investment into a reservoir of one-shot keywords, burning a point of size each time it wants to fly over a blocker, win a combat trade, or swing the turn it arrives. It is a deliberate inversion of how counters usually scale a creature: the more colors you paid for, the more times you can shrink it on purpose for tempo. The design leans on the kind of fixing this keyword was built to reward, and it reads as a stress test of how far Sunburst could be pushed before the rate collapsed entirely. Underpay and it is embarrassing; max it out and the flexibility is real, just never efficient enough to be a creature you reach for over the artifacts that scaled more cleanly.
