Ultron, Unlimited

Connive is the mechanic that makes this design cohere. On its own, the attack trigger reads like a modest self-improving flyer: filter a card, grow if you pitched something nonland. The second ability turns that filtering into a manufacturing line. Every connive event across your board, not just Ultron's own, offers to spawn a 2/2 Robot Villain for a single mana. But the tokens themselves are vanilla: they fly nowhere, connive nothing, and cannot feed the loop that made them. That is the deliberate constraint. The army-builder needs its connive sources primed elsewhere (a critical mass of other filtering creatures), or Ultron is one flyer that occasionally coughs up a robot when it swings. The elegance is in how the two halves misdirect: the payoff is named for a proliferating machine intelligence, yet the copies it produces are inert, so the multiplication only accelerates as you supply the raw material rather than as the board self-sustains. The tax on each token is the throttle, keeping the manufacturing mana-bound instead of free, so the ceiling scales with what you can pour into it turn over turn. It reads as a compact Dimir robot lord whose whole strategic axis is converting card-filtering into board presence, one paid trigger at a time, with the tribal token type gesturing at a swarm you have to assemble yourself rather than one the card hands over.