Master of Waves

The devotion engine in its most explosive form. A 2/1 that asks nothing of itself and everything of the board it lands on: stack the battlefield with blue nonland permanents (each in their mana costs feeding the count) and the enter-the-battlefield trigger spits out an army, while the static +1/+1 anthem upgrades those 1/0 tokens into 2/1 attackers that survive their own existence. That conditional dependence is the whole bargain. Cast it into a thin blue commitment and it does almost nothing; cast it into a developed mono-blue board and it can win the game on the spot, which is exactly the high-variance payoff a devotion mechanic is built to reward. Protection from red is the wrinkle that elevates it from synergy piece to format-warper, but it is worth being precise about who it shields: the master itself shrugs off red burn and red-color removal, becoming functionally unanswerable to a deck leaning on that color. The tokens carry no such protection, so red spells can still pick them off one by one; what they cannot do is reach the source. The design lesson is the value asymmetry protection creates on a token-generating anthem: kill the master and the tokens collapse to 1/0 and die instantly, but the wrong color of removal cannot even target it. Few cards punish a misaligned opposing color this bluntly, and fewer make the case for committing hard to one color so directly.