Claim Jumper
Catch-up ramp is a rare design corner: a payout that only fires when you are behind on lands, and one that scales with how far behind you fall. A 3/3 with vigilance for three mana is a defensible floor on its own, but the enters-the-battlefield check turns a land deficit into fixing, fetching a Plains tapped and then, if an opponent still leads the count, fetching a second during the same resolution. This is Land Tax's logic compressed onto a body: help proportional to the deficit rather than a tax on the leader. The clever part is that the trigger measures the board twice, once on the initial check and again before the repeat, so the number of lands it finds is read off the exact game state at resolution. Against a ramp opener or a fast-mana start you get two lands; in a mirror where the counts are even you get a fair beater and nothing more; on your own strong draw the ability simply does nothing. That conditionality is the price for an effect that would be oppressive if it fired unconditionally: tying the fixing to a position you would rather not occupy is what keeps the rate honest. The Plains restriction locks it to white-based decks, but that is the whole idea; it is insurance for the color least likely to have explosive mana of its own, priced so it only looks good when things are already going badly.




