Valentina Allegra de Fontaine

The whole card hinges on a type-line trick, and that trick rewrites the deck around it. Connive is a mechanic that cares about creature types nowhere in its own text; it just draws, discards, and hands out counters when the discard is a nonland card. What this card does is retrofit a Hero-matters payoff onto a board that was never built for it, by declaring every other Villain you control a Hero too. That single line means the tap ability's "target Hero you control" can point at anything in a Villain-heavy board, and the connive it grants sculpts your hand while growing whatever it touches. The sorcery-speed clause on the activation is the restriction that keeps this from becoming a repeatable instant-speed card-selection engine: on your own turn, you loot and build. The design is a study in how a type-changing static ability can bridge two mechanical subthemes that would otherwise never overlap, letting a Villains-tribal shell run Heroes-matters cards without owning a single stock Hero. As a 2/3 body it does not want to attack; it wants to sit back, tap, and quietly convert a wide board into a grindy card-selection loop. The counter accumulation is slow but relentless, and it turns the connive keyword from a one-shot filtering effect into a recurring growth engine tethered to whatever creature most needs the help that turn.