Geist-Fueled Scarecrow

A 4/4 for four colorless that taxes the deck running it is a rare kind of beater: built to punish creature-heavy strategies and reward the ones that have almost no creatures to punish. The tax is strictly one-sided. It hits only the creature spells its controller casts, leaving an opponent's board untouched and asking the deckbuilder to absorb the cost rather than export it the way a Thalia, Guardian of Thraben pushes friction onto the table. That self-imposed surcharge points the card straight at noncreature shells (artifact decks, control, spell-based combo) that would barely register the extra because they are not casting creatures in the first place, while the go-wide aggressive decks that would most love a cheap fat body are exactly the ones the drawback bleeds. The reward for accepting the bargain is a clean colorless clock that any deck can run regardless of color identity. The catch the body cannot hide is that an artifact creature with no protection is the softest permanent type on the board: it dies to creature removal and artifact removal both, so the deck taking the deal trades evasion-of-interaction for raw, color-agnostic pressure. Most decks shopping for a four-mana 4/4 are creature decks and will quietly walk away; the ones that take it are the ones running barely any creatures at all, which is the exact puzzle the card was constructed around.