Boros Elite

The clearest statement of what battalion was for. A 1/1 for one mana is the entry-level white aggressive body, the kind of card that exists to fill a curve and then asks what else it can do; battalion answers by making the third attacker the trigger. The mechanic only rewards a board already wide enough to attack with three creatures, so this is a payoff that pays out exactly when an aggressive deck is already winning, swinging a 1/1 into a 3/3 for the price of committing to a go-wide plan you were going to commit to anyway. The design discipline is the attack requirement itself: there is no upside until you have the bodies, which keeps a one-drop that becomes a 3/3 from being a midrange staple and pins it to the one archetype it was built to reinforce. It is the simplest possible expression of a keyword built to reward swarming, the floor against which the rest of the cycle's payoffs were measured.