Frogmite

The teaching tool for affinity. Read in isolation it is a terrible deal: a 2/2 creature whose printed four-mana cost suggests you are paying a premium for a body the game hands out at one. The mechanic rewrites that arithmetic. On an artifact-saturated board the cost collapses, and the floor it lands on is zero: a 2/2 that can hit the table for nothing once a few permanents precede it. That is the whole pedagogy of affinity in one card. It does not enable a combo, it does not generate value, it does not threaten anything; it simply demonstrates what happens when a deck's permanents start subsidizing the cost of the next spell. The danger was never Frogmite alone but the engine it modeled, where every artifact you resolve makes the rest cheaper and the discounts compound across a turn. Affinity as a deck took its name from this keyword, and the format's response (restrictions and bans aimed at the cards that filled the battlefield fastest) was a verdict on the discount mechanic itself, not on a 2/2 Frog. Frogmite outlasted that reckoning precisely because it was never the problem: a creature whose only ambition is to cost less, useful as ballast in any artifact-dense shell and inert anywhere else.