Relentless Advance

Four mana for three counters is a bad deal on an empty board and a great one on a growing horde, and the value curve running backward from most token-makers is exactly the point. Cast this into nothing and you get a 3/3 Zombie, unremarkable for the cost. Cast it onto an Army that already survived a turn and you have compounded a single threat into something that dodges the sweeper math opponents use against wide boards. Amass funnels every contribution into one shared body rather than scattering tokens across the table, so this spell is worth the most as your second or third amass effect, not your first. Concentration instead of proliferation is the tension the mechanic resolves, and the counters do work beyond raw stats, since anything that reads +1/+1 counters treats the Army as one large target instead of a swarm of chaff. The oddity here is coloristic: blue rarely gets to grow a creature this cheaply, and the card leans into a control color playing a slow, accretive beatdown, stacking three +1/+1 counters onto a single body while a horde of tokens would have been the more expected route.