Fallaji Chaindancer

Four toughness is what makes the whole plan work: it means the body survives the ground stall it was built to sit in, blocking small attackers and trading up while you spend your turns doing other things. The for double strike is not a mana sink you feed repeatedly; double strike does not stack, so a single activation is the whole play, and every point of mana past the first buys nothing. What it does buy is timing. Because you hold the open and pay at instant speed, the decision waits until you see the board: a favorable block, an unblocked lane, a turn where nobody has removal up. Then the 2/4 becomes a four-power hit for a turn, and the toughness stays four the whole time, so the creature that just doubled its damage is still hard to kill on the swing back. This is the ground-blocker-that-becomes-a-clock pattern, sized for the middle of the game rather than the start of it: at four mana it arrives after the early exchanges, offering a body that shrugs off cheap removal and a place to put mana once a stalled board has run the game long. A workhorse, in other words, built to reward the turns when you have spare mana and no better line, without pretending it does more on any single activation than it actually does.