Thopter Squadron

A counter-driven mana sink built as a two-way valve, and the elegance is in how the two abilities feed each other. Spend mana to peel a +1/+1 counter and you get a flying body that can later be eaten to put a counter back on, so the squadron is both a token factory and a recursion engine for its own output. Both activations are locked to sorcery speed, and that single restriction does the bulk of the balancing work: you cannot ambush blockers or flood the board at instant speed, so the whole apparatus operates on your turn, in the open, one counter at a time. The same timing rule means you cannot dump tokens into the body in response to a sweeper, so the engine offers no real protection against board wipes. The token side produces fodder for the counter side, which lets the card answer a real deckbuilding question: how do you turn surplus mana into a board state that grows rather than a single threat that dies to one removal spell? Because the tokens are themselves Thopters, the second ability folds the first ability's products back into the body, converting a wide board into a single tall flyer or vice versa as the game demands. It is a self-contained value loop on a single permanent, the kind of grindy artifact engine that earns its keep in long games where mana would otherwise sit idle.