Defiant Vanguard

The Rebel package built its identity around tutor chains, and most of those searchers paid the same way: tap, sink five mana, fetch the next link. This one carries that exact engine, a , that pulls any Rebel permanent of mana value four or less onto the battlefield, but it bolts a second clause onto a soft 2/2. Declare it as a blocker and the destruction is mandatory: at end of combat it dies and drags down everything it blocked. The clever part is that this is not a tempo trick you sequence around but a delivery system you commit to at block declaration. Throw it in front of the biggest attacker and you trade a 2/2 for something far costlier, a mana and tempo swing rather than card advantage, since both bodies die. Sequencing matters: the Vanguard goes away at end of combat, so any tutor activation has to fire before that, on the turn it blocks or earlier, never as a parting gift afterward. The five-mana cost puts its search at the heavy end of the chain by design, a payoff you reach late rather than a one-drop you lead on. It reads like a late instinct from the era when a tribe's worth came less from any single card's rate than from the way the bodies fetched one another into an inevitable board.