Namor, Scourge of the Seas

Connive is what turns a five-mana evasive flier into a tribal engine. Each combat on your turn, a creature you control connives, and when the discard cooperates it earns a +1/+1 counter; the static ability then reads the board and grants flying to every other counter-bearing Merfolk you control. The two abilities interlock along a single axis: connive spreads counters one creature at a time, each counter-bearing Merfolk individually earns wings, and so the more counters accumulate across the tribe, the more of it lifts off. That loop makes each counter pay twice, stats and a keyword grant in a single purchase, and it leans into a long tribal habit: Merfolk have treated +1/+1 counters as their working currency since the lords and the counter-doublers, and this design descends directly from that tradition. It also blunts connive's usual failure mode as a repeatable filter, which is stalling on lands you would rather keep: a whiffed discard still cycles a card and keeps the plan moving, while a live discard both fixes the hand and grows a threat. Across a handful of combat steps, a grounded pile of counter-carrying Merfolk quietly converts into an air force, a different attack vector than the tribe's traditional ground swarm. The flavor tracks the rules cleanly: an aquatic villain marshaling a merfolk host into the sky is precisely what the text executes.