Wildgrowth Archaic

The hybrid pips are what make the converge math cut both ways. Cast this with the alternative cost and it enters as a lean 1/1: a single counter for a single color, technically alive but barely earning its slot. Pay all four with distinct colors and it walks in as a 4/4 with trample and reach, and the reward scales precisely with how many colors your manabase can honestly produce. But the entrance stats are the smaller half of the design. The second ability turns converge from a one-time payoff into a standing multiplier: every creature you cast afterward inherits counters equal to the colors that funded it, so a five-color mana engine stops being a fragility to manage and becomes the thing that fattens your whole creature suite. That reversal is the interesting move. Converge normally lives and dies on a single permanent's entrance; here it becomes a persistent tax the rest of your deck pays into and profits from, quietly rewarding a wide manabase on every subsequent deploy rather than once. The discipline built into it is that greed has to be real: splash one off-color source for flavor and the counters barely register, while a genuinely four- or five-color base compounds on itself. Underbuild the mana and it is filler; overbuild it and every creature you cast is a little bigger than it should be.