Nature's Panoply

A single buys one +1/+1 counter, which is almost never why anyone casts this: green has cheaper and fatter single-target growth than a lone counter for a mana. The point is the width. The strive surcharge of per extra target turns a small trick into a build-your-own board pump, letting you spread permanent counters across a developed team at instant speed and settle a stalled ground stall or a knotted multi-way combat in one shot. Because the counters stick rather than fading at end of turn, the card cares about the size a creature ends combat at, not just the moment of the swing, which separates it from a temporary anthem effect. The scaling cost is the entire balancing mechanism: four targets means the base plus three surcharges, ten mana all told, so going wide is a real commitment rather than a free blowout. That price is the decision the card hands you on every cast, and nothing constrains what you can target, only how much you pay to hit more of it. The result is a modular combat trick that reads as a throwaway spell when you are poor and a finisher when you are flooded, with the strive tax alone doing the work of keeping it from being oppressive.