Bygone Colossus

Nine mana buys a 9/9, a rate nobody pays willingly, and the top-end designer's oldest problem is baked right into that line: a nine-drop is a brick in your opening hand and irrelevant if the game ends before you assemble the mana. Warp threads between those failure states without solving either by pricing the body cheap. For you can deploy the Colossus now, but the fine print refuses to turn that early copy into tempo. It arrives summoning-sick, warp grants neither haste nor flash, and the end-step exile collects it before your opponent ever untaps. So the cast attacks nothing and blocks nothing; what that mana actually buys is a one-turn window of enters-the-battlefield presence (a trigger enabler, a device to feed a sacrifice engine, a body to tap for something on the same turn it lands) plus the guarantee that the card is not marooned as a dead nine-drop. The elegant part is exile-as-bookmark. Blink effects like Cloudshift exile a creature and return it that same cycle, resetting its counters and auras; warp instead leaves the card parked in exile as a promise it honors on a later turn, letting one physical copy do work at both ends of the game. The tension it resolves is the finisher's paradox: how to make a top-end threat contribute before the finish arrives, without simply making it small enough to break.