Nesting Dragon

Every land drop leaves behind a 0/2 egg that does nothing until it dies, and that death clause is the entire machine. The card inverts the usual relationship between a permanent and the removal aimed at it: sweep the eggs, chump them into an attacker, feed them to a sacrifice outlet, and you have converted a wall into a 2/2 flier with a firebreathing mana sink stapled on. Interaction reads as an upgrade rather than a loss, which is a strange posture for red to hold. The color is built to race, to spend its resources forward, to punish the opponent for being slow rather than for being active. Here the reward runs the other way: it wants you to grind, to bank land drops into a widening squadron that outlasts single-target removal and absorbs board wipes into fresh 2/2s. The 5/4 flier on the front is almost beside the point; it falls to whatever answers a five-drop and rarely carries a game alone. The value is in the token layers, and anything that stacks landfall triggers (fetchlands, extra land drops, effects that bounce a land back to hand for a fresh entry) compounds the egg count. What keeps it honest is patience: no egg matters until it dies, so the card asks a fast color to play the long attrition game it usually refuses.