Garrison Sergeant

Double strike on a 3/3 doubles a five-mana body into something that closes games quickly, but the conditional is the whole design: turn the static keyword on only when you control a Gate, and you have built a card that pays a deck for committing to a land type that does almost nothing on its own. Gates are slow, tapped, and otherwise pure fixing; this is the payoff that makes the downside worth running. The card belongs to a small family of Gate-matters creatures that try to convert a clunky manabase into a board-state threat, and it sits at the aggressive end of that group: where most Gate rewards lean on raw card advantage or scaling power, this one just asks you to swing. The body still attacks for three with no Gate in play, so the card never reads as dead; it simply scales from filler to finisher the moment a single Gate hits the battlefield. That binary is the tension the design lives on. A 3/3 double striker is a real clock, the kind of body that ends a stalled board in two turns, and the gating condition is loose enough (any one Gate, checked continuously) that a deck built around them rarely struggles to flip the switch. Its evergreen reputation rests entirely on whether the format ever rewards a dedicated Gate strategy: in those decks it is a closer, and everywhere else it is a vanilla beater holding a key to a door no one has built.