Crystalline Giant
The randomness is the whole design gamble, and it cuts both ways. Here is a colorless three-drop that upgrades itself, but you never choose the improvement: at the beginning of combat on your turn, the trigger picks at random from nine keyword counters and a +1/+1 counter it doesn't already carry. That constraint is what pays for putting flying, deathtouch, hexproof, first strike, and the rest all on one artifact body. A creature that could assemble that package on demand would be a nightmare to cost; one that assembles it in an unpredictable order, potentially rolling into vigilance or a stat bump when you needed evasion, is a fairer thing to hand any deck willing to run it. The payoff scales with time, not sequencing skill: because it only accretes on your own combats, leave it alive across enough turns and it eventually holds every counter in the list, at which point the choice runs out and it just keeps swinging as a walking pile of abilities. That patience curve is the tension the design is built around, rewarding board states where the Giant survives to attack again and punishing decks that need a specific keyword now rather than a probabilistic one later. As a colorless body it slots into any color identity, which is why it has found more of a home in singleton formats that prize flexible, deck-agnostic creatures. The stack is also fragile: none of the counters grant indestructible, so a burn spell or a bounce effect can wipe out several combats of accumulation in a single card, and a flicker resets the body to zero.
