Carrion Wurm

A 6/5 for five mana in black is a perfectly serviceable beater, and the wurm is happy to look like one right up until combat, where it hands the brake to the defending side. The attack-or-blocks trigger lets any player exile three cards from their graveyard to zero out the wurm's damage entirely: spend the cards and the swing is neutralized, the wurm's combat damage is neutralized, the turn's worth of pressure simply does not happen. That inverts the usual relationship between a creature and its controller. Most beaters ask the opponent to find a removal spell or a chump; this one asks them to find three cards they can spare from the bin, often a far cheaper toll. What complicates the bargain is that those cards are a real cost to the player paying them. The graveyard mattered enormously in the era that produced this design (flashback wanted cards in the yard, and a threshold count of seven turned them into a binary switch), so exiling three is rarely free and sometimes ruinous. The wurm's whole proposition turns on that math: it is a body whose stats are a fiction until an opponent decides whether the brake is worth pulling, a stalemate piece in attrition mirrors and an honest threat only when the graveyard tax has become too steep to pay. You pay five for a 6/5 because the 6/5 is not entirely yours to command.