Storm of Forms

Cast this cold and it is a four-mana bounce spell, no better and no worse than the plainest return-to-hand in blue. Everything else the card does hangs on one word: kind. On cast, it copies itself once for each distinct variety of counter present among your permanents, and the check is on category, not quantity. A +1/+1 counter, a loyalty counter, a charge counter, a stun counter, an oil counter: each different type adds one more copy, and none of them is spent or removed. The spell reads your board and multiplies off it. Because the copies come from the cast trigger, they hit the stack together and resolve before the original, sliding a fistful of instant-speed bounces past a single counterspell or a lone flash blocker. The permission to choose new targets is where the payoff lives: the copies do not have to pile onto one permanent, so a board carrying four counter varieties makes four copies on top of the original, enough to peel five separate threats off the table at once. The engine it rewards is narrow and unusual. Token-swarm and sacrifice decks give it nothing; it wants a menagerie where the counter types are diverse, the sort of board a proliferate shell or a superfriends pile assembles almost by accident. The floor is a single bounce for anyone who casts it blind, and the ceiling belongs to a board that has quietly stocked its permanents with a spread of counter categories.