Sweep the Skies

Converge inverts the usual token-maker calculus, where color fixing is a tax you pay to reach raw quantity. Here fixing is the quantity: the swarm counts colors of mana spent, not total mana, so it caps at five Thopters no matter how large X grows. A dedicated blue deck pouring ten mana into the X slot still gets exactly one flier. Reaching all five colors is harder than it looks, because the double-blue in the cost already books two of your slots; to add white, black, red, and green on top of that, X has to be at least four, meaning six total mana before the fifth Thopter appears. That is the reward structure in a sentence: the card does not care how deep your resources run, only how wide your palette does, which pushes the payoff toward the greediest manabases rather than the ones that generate the most of a single color. The Thopters themselves are the dependable artifact-flier chassis blue has leaned on since Thopter Foundry and Sharding Sphinx, so the payload slots into go-wide and artifact-matters plans without asking for anything unusual. The sorcery-speed restriction is the other anchor: no flashing in a swarm to ambush an attack, no rebuilding at instant speed after a wrath, so the whole plan is telegraphed a turn in advance. What you build around it is a manabase harder to assemble and more fragile to disrupt, wagering that five one-power fliers justify the fragility.