Nicanzil, Current Conductor
When a creature explores, it reveals the top card and hands you a binary payout: land or nonland, one path or the other. This Merfolk reads that split as two separate triggers and cashes in on whichever way it lands. Reveal a land, and the ordinary "miss" (the outcome that usually just cantrips the card past your library) becomes acceleration: a second land drops from hand onto the battlefield tapped, converting information into mana development. Reveal a nonland, and Nicanzil takes a +1/+1 counter directly. The key detail is that both triggers key off the revealed card's type, not the choice you make afterward about whether to keep it on top. Explore already surfaces that information for free; this design collects a piece of it that would otherwise evaporate. The cost is volume: neither half does much on a single trigger, so the deckbuilding pull is toward a critical mass of explorers rather than one large payoff, and the ramp half specifically wants a land-heavy hand to have fuel to deploy. Note the asymmetry in who each half serves. The land trigger is optional and advances the whole board's mana; the counter trigger is mandatory and grows only the conductor. That makes it a two-drop that scales itself while the explore engine hums along beneath it, never demanding that you hold up a spell or commit to a combat step to get paid.

