Fungal Shambler
This was the era that paid players to cross the enemy-color lines a year of design had spent drawing, and few cards advertise the bargain louder than a three-color beater that hands you a card and rips one from the opponent every time it connects. Trample is the connective tissue: the 6/4 body wants combat damage to land on a player rather than splatter against a wall of chumps, and at six power it shoves through most ground blockers to get there. The reward doubles on contact, a card drawn and a card stripped, so a single unblocked swing tilts the resource count by two. The cost of all that is the cost: seven mana spread across black, green, and blue, a body that does nothing until it lands a hit, and four toughness durable enough to shrug off the cheap two- and three-damage burn but brittle against the bigger removal that wedge decks invite. It is a creature built to widen a lead rather than reverse a deficit, an attacker whose value clause assumes the board is already tilting your way. As a snapshot of the gold-card era's design language it is honest about the deal: lean hard into the wedge, take a top-end payoff for committing to three colors, and let the steep mana act as the brake on a draw-and-discard trigger that would be oppressive on any cheaper frame.


