Siege of Towers

Animating your own lands is a strange place to point red mana, and replicate is what turns the trick from a curiosity into a swing. The base cost converts a single Mountain into a 3/1 that still taps for mana; every additional you fold in spins off another copy, each free to point at a different Mountain. A mana base full of basics is the fuel, and the payoff is a burst of cheap power that lands all at once rather than across several turns. The catch is structural: lands turned into creatures are uniquely exposed, dying to anything that touches the board and dragging your mana production down with them, which is why a 3/1 for two mana can be priced this low. That exposure doubles as the limiter, restricting the play to a turn where losing the lands costs you nothing. Replicate was an early-era answer to a scaling problem (how to let a spell grow without making any single copy too strong), and this is among its more aggressive uses: cast once it does little, but four animated Mountains attacking at once converts a glut of excess mana into a clock. It is a flood-relief valve more than a burn spell, narrow work, but real when the deck has drawn its whole library's worth of land and needs a way to close.