Restless Spire

Manlands have always carried the same bargain: a land that can attack pays for the flexibility by entering tapped and by soaking up mana to animate, so you never get free tempo. This cycle refines the trade by attaching the payoff to the swing itself rather than to the size of the body. A 2/1 with first strike on your turn is not a clock; it is a threat you animate when a board is stalled or an opponent is tapped out, and the scry it fires on attack is the actual reason to bother. The animation cost matches the two colors the land taps for, so you are only ever spending mana you were already producing to turn it on. That keeps the creature mode measured rather than greedy: the body dies to removal like any other creature, but an opponent who spends a card to kill it is trading a real answer for a manabase slot, and you were never committing more than a scry's worth of ambition to the attack. Where the earliest animated lands wanted to be pure beaters, closing games on raw stats, this design leans the other direction, giving up power and toughness for repeatable card selection. It is a land slot that quietly deepens your draws over a long game: less a finisher than a way to smooth every future draw step while still holding a body in reserve.