Orochi Hatchery

Pay X twice for the charge counters, then five more and a tap to cash them in. As an artifact it has no summoning sickness, so a player who can muster the activation cost the same turn can fire it immediately; the practical limit is mana, not patience. That mana, though, is the whole problem: a hatchery built for ten counters wants X set to ten, a twenty-mana commitment before a single snake exists, plus another five to convert. That arithmetic only pencils out in a game drifting well past the point where one hard cast decides anything. What it actually sells is repeatability. The counters stay put; the activation recurs every turn you can spare five mana, so the same artifact that looks absurd as a one-shot becomes a snake faucet that floods the board across multiple turns. This is mana-storage design in its rawest form, a battery you fill once and discharge on your own schedule. There are faster ways to make tokens and faster ways to empty a swollen mana pool, but few that let a stranded flood convert into a standing army with no spell to draw and no creature on the stack to lose to a counter. The cost structure makes a token engine out of surplus mana, which is exactly what a deck has too much of once the long game has become the only game being played.