Feral Throwback
Two keywords on one body, both pointed at the same fantasy: a tribal Beast deck so wide it can afford to hold reserves and still strong-arm the fight it wants. Amplify 2 reads as raw upside, but it fights its own deck: it pays out only for Beast cards still rotting in hand when the creature resolves, which means the better your board, the worse your amplify, since the Beasts you would want as fuel are exactly the ones you already cashed onto the table. Provoke completes the gamble, forcing a chosen blocker to untap and trade rather than letting the defender decide; pair it with a counter-loaded body and you get a designated assassin for whatever creature the opponent least wants to lose. The catch is the price of a miss. Strip away the amplify counters and this is still a 3/3 for six, but it keeps Provoke, so even the bare version drags something into combat on attack: not a payoff, but not inert either. The split runs the whole length of the card. The ceiling is a swollen attacker that murders a key blocker for free; the floor is a real tempo loss that at least retains a relevant ability. This is amplify at its most ambitious and least forgiving, a high-variance reward for a tribe that, across its printings, never reliably assembled the hand density the keyword demands.


