Crowd Favorites

The body never matters here; the mana sink does. A 4/4 for this much commitment is barely a creature at all, more a delivery vehicle for two repeatable abilities priced so a flooded late game has somewhere to dump its untapped lands. The tap mode is the one that earns its keep: a recurring lockdown that pins a blocker or stalls an attacker turn after turn, and because it carries no timing restriction, it fires at instant speed. You can hold the mana up and tap an incoming threat before attackers are declared, a flexibility nothing about the frame advertises. The +0/+5 mode turns the Favorites into a wall that survives nearly any combat math, though it draws from the same well as the tap ability; you rarely want both in a turn and almost never have the mana for it. What keeps the card honest is the toll on each activation: a price per use, well above what white usually charges to tap a creature, on a body with no evasion to push damage on its own. It belongs to a lineage of expensive creatures with built-in mana sinks, designs that gave grindy, resource-rich late games something repeatable to do rather than something fast to win with.