Beluna's Gatekeeper // Entry Denied

Adventure's cleanest trick is turning a slow creature into two spells you pay for on separate turns, and this design leans all the way into the split. Entry Denied is the front half you want early: a cheap tempo bounce that only bites the small stuff, capped so it reads as a check on aggressive early boards rather than an unconditional answer. That ceiling is the price for the two-for-one structure; you are not getting a flexible catch-all, you are getting a narrow early-game intervention that banks its second half in exile. The creature waiting there is a 6/5, a body that closes games rather than trades into them, and the design logic is that you rarely want both halves in the same window. You spend the bounce when the board is small and reach for the Giant when the board is large. What keeps the split fair is that neither mode warps a game alone: six mana for a mostly vanilla 6/5 is a reasonable rate, and a sorcery-speed bounce with a size limit on its target is a reasonable rate, but folding them into one card removes the deckbuilding tax of running both separately. The cap on the bounce does quiet work too, stopping the tempo half from erasing midrange threats and preserving the card as a curve-filler built to answer decks trying to go under you rather than over you.