Verazol, the Split Current

Kicker turns the X in this Serpent's cost into two currencies at once, and that double duty is the whole engine. Every mana spent to cast it (the base included, so even at X=0 it lands as a 2/2) becomes a +1/+1 counter, sizing the body to exactly how much you poured in. But those counters are not decoration; they are ammunition. Each kicked spell you cast afterward can eat two of them to fork the spell, choosing new targets on the copy. That reframes kicker from a pay-more-for-more toggle into a spend-once, spend-again resource loop: the mana that funded the front-end swell cashes out, two counters at a time, into copies. The tension is deliberate. Load it up with a large X and you get a fat body sitting on a deep reservoir of copies you drain slowly; keep it lean and every kicked spell empties that reservoir almost as fast as you built it. Copying kicked spells specifically is the elegant part, because kicker already scales an effect, so doubling a kicked burn spell or a kicked enter-the-battlefield trigger compounds something that was already paying a premium to be large. It is a rare payoff that keys off no creature type and no keyword count, only a single mechanic's presence when you cast the spell, and it asks a deckbuilder to lean into kicker as the deck's organizing principle rather than an occasional surcharge.