Conclave Guildmage

The guildmage shell is older than any single printing that uses it: a modest body carrying two color-gated activated abilities, one cheap and repeatable, one expensive and ongoing. What separates this pair from the pattern is which jobs each half picks up. The green side is the aggressive lever, handing your whole team trample for a single mana, a repeatable evasion grant that punishes the gang-blocking a go-wide army would otherwise invite; leave it available and a clogged battlefield resolves into a lethal swing. The white side is the grind engine, a token maker that asks six mana per activation but never runs dry, replacing chumped attackers and feeding the same trample math the green ability enables. The design rewards reading the board: while you are racing and pressing an advantage, green ends games; once the ground stalls and mana stops mattering, white rebuilds faster than removal can keep up. The bargain lives in that 2/2, which must survive into the midgame for either half to earn out. It dies to nearly any cheap removal, and the token cost is steep enough that a full activation buys just one 2/2 Elf Knight with vigilance. Survive, though, and it becomes the kind of board-state lever that grows more dangerous the longer a game runs, which is precisely what the guildmage template has always promised: a low floor, a high ceiling, and a second activation that has to be defended into.