Elvish Champion

Forestwalk is the tell here: this is an evasion lord disguised as an anthem. Most tribal lords just hand out a flat +1/+1 and let the swarm do the math, but this one grants every other Elf an unblockable line into any opponent sitting on a Forest, which in practice is most green decks and a fair share of the rest. The trade-off is that the evasion is contingent on the defending player's mana base rather than yours, so the keyword swings from game-warping to dead depending on who you're facing. Against a Forest-light board it reads as a plain 2/2 that pumps the team; against a mirror or a green-heavy table it converts a stalled Elf board into a board that simply walks past the blockers. That conditionality is the price the design pays for stapling evasion to an anthem instead of charging more mana for it. As one of the early Elf lords reprinted into the core-set era, it sits in the lineage that runs from the small green tribe toward the engine-driven Elf decks that came later, and it remains the one whose contribution is geometry rather than raw stats: it doesn't make the Elves bigger so much as it makes them impossible to stop.