Anurid Brushhopper

Two cards in hand buys near-total immunity. Pay the discard and the Brushhopper exiles itself, dodging the entire spectrum of targeted removal, board wipes, and combat damage, then returns at the next end step as if nothing happened. The cost is the elegant part: it taxes your grip rather than your life or your mana, so the protection is rationed by how much you are willing to empty your hand. A 3/4 for three was already a fine green-white body in its era, but the discard ability turned it into one of the most frustrating creatures to answer in fair attrition matchups, where the opponent burns a removal spell only to watch it come back for the price of cards you might have wanted to pitch anyway. That same clause is also a build-around in disguise, since discarding two cards is a feature for graveyard strategies that want fuel in the bin: reanimation targets, threshold counts, flashback fodder. The tension here is protection-without-the-keyword, hexproof reached not by a static rule but by a player-controlled blink that exiles and rebuilds the creature each turn. It asks you to weigh card economy against survival every time someone points a spell at it, and a creature that makes that question recurring rather than one-time is doing more design work than its modest stat line suggests.