Elder Land Wurm

The design is a single-line riddle: a defender that stops holding back the moment it commits to combat. Defender holds the ground, trample punishes anyone who finally lets it through, and the self-erasing clause on block means the card is a fortress until you decide it isn't, at which point it is a 5/5 trampler with no further strings attached. Read in mid-1990s vocabulary, this was an early attempt at the "sleeper attacker" idea that white and green have revisited many times since, usually with Animate Wall effects or keyword-removal tricks; here the trigger is baked into the creature itself, which is a tidier piece of design than its era usually managed. The cost is the catch. Triple-white at seven mana value puts it in a bracket where the competition is finishers that win the game rather than walls that occasionally swing, and the body, while honest, does not scale to that price. What the card is remembered for is the idea rather than the rate: a defender that graduates into an attacker on its own terms, conceived years ahead of the rules language that would later formalize such tricks. Later wall-tribal payoffs and the various Assault Formation lines all owe something to the conceit this card stated first.