Marshmist Titan

The printed cost is a ceiling you are never meant to pay. Seven mana for a 4/5 is a non-card; the entire design lives in the discount clause, which folds the body's price into the same engine that powers black's devotion strategies. Every black pip already on the battlefield (the swamps' worth of mana symbols on the permanents you control) shaves a mana off the bill, so in a board state where devotion decks want to be anyway, this lands for two or three and sometimes for a single black. That is the tension the design resolves: devotion payoffs usually want to be enchantments or creatures whose own pips feed the count, but a beater that gets cheaper as the count climbs is a different shape of payoff, one that rewards a developed board with a body rather than a static effect. The 4/5 is deliberately unexciting because the rate is supposed to come from the cost reduction, not the stat line; a flashier body would have made the early-game floor too punishing when devotion is low. It reads its own cost off the devotion total the same way Gray Merchant of Asphodel reads its drain, but where the Merchant cashes the count in for value, this cashes it in for tempo: a creature that arrives off-curve once the symbols pile up.