Crosis's Attendant

Built for an era when funding a three-color legend off an awkward base was a genuine deckbuilding cost, this is a 3/3 that exists to die: pay , sacrifice the body, and convert that investment into the precise Grixis colors of Crosis, the Purger. The design logic is blunt. A 3/3 for five is below rate in combat, so the value lands in fixing instead, smoothing a blue-black-red base that an enemy-and-ally arc like Grixis demanded before fetch lands and dual lands made those bases trivial. The sacrifice clause keeps it from being a Manalith stapled to legs: rather than parking a permanent ritual on the board, the body can block or threaten a trade first, then burst into the dragon's casting cost once you finally have the mana to deploy it. That two-stage use (chump now, ramp later) is the whole reason to hang fixing on a creature instead of printing the same color burst as an enchantment or an instant. The rate has not aged well; the manabase tax that justified a card like this has largely been engineered out of the game. But as a record of how an early multicolor block taught players to think about paying for Grixis legends off rough lands, it is a clean artifact of its design moment.