Sage of the Skies
The copy clause here is a cast trigger, not an enters trigger, and that distinction is the whole engine. It fires on the stack the moment you cast this, checking only that you've already cast another spell this turn: a cheap cantrip, a one-mana removal spell, anything to clear the counter. Meet that condition and you get two 2/3 flyers with lifelink for the price of one, the token arriving alongside the original with no additional mana. The design leans on a specific tension in white's aggressive shells, which have always wanted evasive lifegain bodies but rarely wanted to spend a full turn deploying just one. Tying the doubling to a spells-matter prerequisite rather than to raw mana keeps the payoff honest: it rewards decks already built to churn through cheap spells while doing nothing extra for a durdle deck that plays one thing a turn. Because the trigger reads intent at cast rather than resolution, it also sidesteps a common failure mode of enters-doubling effects: a counterspell can stop the original, but the copy is a separate object already made, so it still resolves. That makes the card's floor higher than most storm-adjacent payoffs, which collapse entirely if the key spell is answered.



