Sigil of the Nayan Gods

Most build-around auras carry a buried tax: the better the modifier, the worse the card rots when the board is empty or the target is gone. This one prices that risk into the spell itself. An aura whose bonus equals your creature count is only worth casting when you already have a crowd, and against a thin board it would otherwise be a dead three-mana commitment. The hybrid cycling cost is the release valve. From the hand, before you ever cast it, a single green-or-white mana turns it into a fresh card, so the same piece of cardboard is both the payoff for going wide and the insurance against not having gone wide yet. That choice happens entirely before the spell hits the stack: once cast as an aura, it is a normal aura, and a removal spell aimed at the target in response will fizzle it like any other. The cycling clause does not save you there. What it does is let the card sit comfortably in a deck that wants bodies more than it wants this specific effect, never clogging an opening hand. The math itself rewards committing first and pumping later: dropped on a token-maker's army or a tribal swarm, the +1/+1 per creature outscales any flat bonus an aura at this rate could promise, then asks one of those bodies to carry the team over the top.