Catacomb Dragon

A combat dragon built around a punishment trigger rather than raw stats: the 4/4 flying body is unremarkable for six mana, but the blocking clause turns it into a deterrent against ganging up. The design quirk worth dwelling on is what the trigger reduces and what it leaves alone. It strips power, not toughness, and only half (rounded down), so the math punishes a defending board's offensive output rather than killing the blockers outright. The blockers may still die the ordinary way: the Dragon deals 4 combat damage, divided among its blockers, so a lone blocker with four or less toughness perishes regardless of the trigger. What the -X/-0 actually buys is protection on the way in, since every nonartifact, non-Dragon creature that throws itself in front to gang-block has its own power clipped before damage is dealt, blunting a chump-and-counterattack plan. The carve-outs are the tell about the era's design instincts. Artifact creatures and other Dragons block at full strength, which reads as flavor (dragons fear their own kind, constructs feel no fear) doing double duty as a balancing lever. Tying the body's value to that triggered combat effect rather than to sheer size means it does not connect for damage when blocked (no trample), but it worsens the opponent's blocking decisions and survives multi-block scenarios that would trade down a vanilla 4/4: an early experiment in pricing a beater on what its ability denies the defender, not on what its stats threaten.