Saruman, the White Hand

Grixis rarely gets a spellslinger payoff that grows a board, because those three colors usually point their mana at direct answers rather than a token engine. This is the design threading that needle: it turns every noncreature spell into Orc counters scaled to the spell's mana value, so a four-mana wrath or a five-mana draw spell that would normally leave you empty-handed instead swells a single Army into a real threat. Amass is what keeps it from sprawling into a token-swarm problem; it pours everything onto one growing body, meaning removal on the Army resets the whole investment rather than trimming a wide board. That concentration is the tension the card lives inside, and the ward it hands to Orcs and Goblins is the answer to it: the payoff and the protection ship in the same package. The 2/5 frame is deliberately defensive, a body built to survive the early turns while you cast the noncreature spells that are the actual plan, not a beater in its own right. The result rewards a control shell for playing exactly the cards it already wants (counters, removal, card draw) and quietly converts each of them into board presence, closing the gap between durdling with no impact and assembling a lethal Army without ever asking the pilot to change what they cast.