Drift of the Dead

Snow gives the body, and the body grows with every snow land you commit to: four makes a 4/4 blocker, ten makes a 10/10 that no early creature gets past. Because the count is read continuously, a board wipe that strips your lands shrinks the wall mid-game, and ramping into more snow grows it mid-combat. This was one of Ice Age's clearest demonstrations of what snow was meant to be: a deckbuilding tax paid up front in your manabase, then redeemed as a mechanical payoff. Tying a creature's power and toughness to a land supertype rather than its own static line was an unusual move for the era, and the defender clause is what fences the rate into pure defense. A body this large for this little mana would be absurd attacking, so the design confines it to making the ground impassable, a brick wall that holds while spells elsewhere close the game. Snow-matters payoffs went mostly dormant for years after this set before later expansions revived snow as a resource type, which leaves Drift of the Dead as an early proof of a recurring idea: that the lands you play, not just the spells, can be the thing that scales.