Emperor Crocodile
A 5/5 for four mana with no evasion and no keywords was an aggressively costed body for its era, and the price of that rate is written into the second line: the moment your board empties of other creatures, the croc eats itself. The drawback is a state-triggered ability, checked continuously rather than once on entry, which is what makes it so unforgiving. A board wipe takes the Crocodile down with everything else, and a well-timed edict can strip your last blocker and leave you watching your own 5/5 sacrifice itself with nothing your opponent has to spend on it. The design pays for an undercosted statline by demanding the thing aggressive green decks least want to maintain: a wide board, exactly the resource that the burliest threat is supposed to let you forgo. That tension is the whole card. It wants to be the closer that finishes a developed board, but it punishes you for being the player who has already won the development race and is now down to a single haymaker. The clean rate reads like a vanilla beater, and the company has returned to the "huge body that needs friends" template many times since (creatures that sacrifice when alone, that shrink without allies), but few state the bargain this bluntly. It is a power-level lever disguised as a beatstick, and the lever only moves in your opponent's favor.





