Gaea's Protector

A 4/2 body for four mana reads as unimpressive right up until you notice what the extra rules text buys: the defender loses the option to let it through. The usual problem with a fragile attacker is that a smart opponent simply takes the hit and holds blockers for a threat worth spending them on. Here that door is closed. The defending player must assign at least one blocker if any creature can legally do so, which means the Protector is not a beater so much as a battlefield lever: it drags out a chump, clears a lane for the rest of your team, and turns any pump spell or first-strike trick into a trade you script in advance. The lopsided power-to-toughness split is the point of the design. The card wants to die in combat, ideally dragging something larger down with it, so the four power and two toughness are not a liability but the engine; you are paying for a guaranteed block, not for a creature that survives it. It sits in a small green tradition of forced-combat effects that descend from older lure auras, with one structural difference that matters: the compulsion lives on the creature itself rather than on an enchantment, so it cannot be dodged by killing the enchanted creature out from under the trick. Plain, honest, and a little mean, it strips away the opponent's agency in the one phase where agency usually decides the game.