Sawtooth Thresher

Sunburst pays you for greedy manabases, and this Construct is the rare body that does something interesting with the reward. Most Sunburst cards bank their counters as raw stats and leave them there; here the counters are fuel. Pay all five colors and it arrives as a 6/6 (its printed 1/1 plus five counters), then dumps two of those counters to swing as an 8/8 for the turn before settling back to a 4/4 that still carries the threat of doing it again. That activation reframes what the counters are: not a fixed payoff for hitting your colors, but a battery you spend across combat steps, trading permanent size for a burst exactly when an attack or block needs it. The friction is in the strip rate: each pump removes two counters, so the size you paid for empties fast. A four-color cast can still pump twice before the body withers to its base 1/1, but every color you skip is a swing you give up later. The card most rewards the kind of five-color artifact-and-rock shell that wants every color on tap anyway, which is precisely the deck the mechanic was built to encourage. As a piece of counter-conversion design it sits ahead of its early-era peers: most counter payoffs of the period only ever added, while this one lets you cash counters back in for tempo on a turn that asks for it.