Marath, Will of the Wild

The body is a battery, and that single design idea reorganizes everything the card does. Entering with counters equal to mana spent means it scales with how much you pour into it, and from there the three modes convert stored counters into board state, removal, or tokens at a one-mana-per-point rate. Pump a blocker, ping a face, fabricate a chump: the choice resets every time you have mana to feed it. The X-can't-be-zero clause on each mode is the quiet governor, blocking the trivial loop of removing zero counters to trigger nothing while keeping value. It sits in the Shard-color toolbox lineage, where the appeal is not a single combo but the breadth of legal answers a flexible activated ability provides. Marath's particular contribution is mana-sink elasticity: a 0/0 that is only as large and as useful as the resources you commit, refundable across modes over and over. Crucially, the engine does not refuel itself: activating a mode spends counters down, and only outside effects that add counters (or recasting it larger) rearm the body. That dependency is also the weakness, since it does nothing until you bankroll it and empties out once its counters are spent. The design trades raw efficiency for a leader that is never a dead draw and never out of things to do with leftover mana, a 0/0 that is precisely as threatening as your mana that turn.