Spike Tiller

The Spike mechanic was a small experiment in stored value: creatures that arrive with a pool of +1/+1 counters and let you spend them down, redistributing power across your board instead of locking it in a single body. This one carries the idea furthest. The first ability is the familiar Spike move, peeling a counter off to grow a teammate. The second is the strange one: it can turn any of your lands into a 2/2 creature that stays a land, then immediately drops a counter on the new body to make it a 3/3. That clause is doing two jobs at once. It manufactures a board out of the resource you already have the most of, and it does so at the price of shrinking the Tiller itself, since every activation comes off its own back. The tension is built into the engine. You start with a 0/0 holding three counters and a choice: hold the counters and stay a sizable beater, or strip-mine yourself into a wider battlefield of animated lands and pumped allies. Animating your own mana base is a real liability (those lands die to anything that kills a creature, and they were producing mana a moment ago), which is exactly the cost the design wants you to weigh. Few cards render the Spike fantasy this literally: a creature whose whole purpose is to plant its strength elsewhere and dwindle in the doing.