Wayfaring Temple

Populate has a structural flaw that most of its carriers never address: it can only duplicate a creature token already on the battlefield, so an empty board makes it whiff entirely. This three-drop does not patch that half, and the design knows better than to try. What it solves is the payoff. The body scales with the board, so the go-wide deck that wants populate to matter is exactly the deck that turns this into a real threat, and the combat trigger fires only after damage connects, which makes each populate a reward for a board state already tilted your way. The loop tightens once it gets going: every token you copy adds a creature, which adds power and toughness here, which pushes more damage through, which triggers populate again. It is one of the cleaner expressions of the Selesnya token-swarm plan, where the engine and the payoff sit on the same card. The dependency cuts both ways, though. Because it counts itself, it is never smaller than a 1/1, but strip away the rest of your board and that 1/1 is all you have, plus a trigger that produces nothing. Stapling a populate engine onto a creature that wins races on its own is a bargain the design only honors on a full board, which is why this belongs to the deck that assembles the swarm first and reaches for the Temple to compound it.