Tilonalli's Summoner

Ascend was the keyword that asked the question this card answers: what happens to a token payoff when the bodies it makes are rented, not owned? The attack trigger spits out X Elementals that enter tapped and attacking, but without the city's blessing they vanish at the next end step, one swing through the defending player's blockers and then gone. So the body is a two-part contract. Early, it is a burst you borrow: whatever punches through has to earn its damage in that single combat, because none of it comes back. Cross the ten-permanent threshold and the same trigger stops recycling its output, building a standing army that compounds every combat. The self-bootstrapping wrinkle is that the tokens enter already in combat, so every activation nudges you toward the blessing the moment it fires; a board wide enough to keep them is partly a board the Summoner assembled itself. That loop is why the effect is allowed to scale on X at all: the design lets you pay for a swing you haven't earned the right to keep, then converts the swing into the permanents that flip the switch. A 1/1 for two that has to attack into a stocked board to generate its real value is fragile by construction, but the fragility is the price of an effect that, left alone a turn too long, turns a temporary token trick into a lethal one.