Tolarian Terror

Delve got the headlines, but this Serpent solves the same problem without touching exile. It reads the graveyard instead of eating it: every instant and sorcery already sitting there trims a mana off the cost, so a pile of spent counterspells and cantrips reassembles into a 5/5 that can hit the table for two or three mana on a turn you also had time to do something else. The body is intentionally plain (no evasion, no card draw, no combat trigger), because its whole value is being cheap, large, and difficult to answer. Ward 2 does the difficult-to-answer part: spot removal that would shrug off a five-power creature now has to pay a two-mana tax at instant speed, and in a mirror where both players are hoarding interaction, that tax is often the gap between the Serpent trading and the Serpent finishing. Spell-heavy blue decks have always struggled to convert a graveyard of used answers into a clock; this turns that accumulated exhaust into pressure, and it arrives priced to show up around the point the control deck has already won the attrition war on paper. It is the counterspell-and-cantrip archetype's reward for playing exactly the way it wanted to play anyway.