Flailing Ogre

Both pump abilities are open to the whole table, and that single permission turns a clean 3/3 into an auction. Either player can spend a mana to grow it or to shrink it, and during combat the size of the creature becomes whatever both sides are willing to keep paying for, an arms race that ends only when one player runs dry of mana or nerve. The shrink half is the genuinely hostile part: an opponent can pay this thing down to nothing and kill it outright if you have no mana to push back, which means you frequently have to leave mana untapped just to protect a body you already cast. That is the inversion the card runs on, your own threat held to ransom by a button anyone at the table can press. It comes out of an early-era experiment in making combat math an open negotiation rather than a concealed trick, replacing the hidden combat-trick mind game with a public, mana-for-mana bidding war where every point of power has a posted price. The base rate is fair; the size in any given fight is contested, and the friction of defending what you own is the entire idea.