This is definitely one of those commanders who can succumb to its own hubris
Making insignificant creatures into serious threats has a lot of value, especially if you tag creatures like Esper Sentinel or Captain Ripley Vance that care about their power
While the set-up for the turtle may be appropriately slow, the payoff is explosive, and it could find a home in Modern quite easily
The card got printed almost exactly as Dillon sent it to me: It made for a really important design lesson: sometimes you need another person to break you out of your focus on how to make a card work
Not background necessarily, but some other line of text that says something along the lines of Whenever you sacrifice a Treasure token, give a creature a +1/+1 counter and trample until end of turn. That would make it a lot more interesting and powerful, but I suppose not every card needs to be great
This power is redundant in 1v1, but in a multiplayer format, it offers a player a way to bypass the usual rules and sweep a win, forcing an interesting dynamic where other players need to protect Shinryus target
