Gilded Cerodon
The conditional here is doing something subtler than it looks: the Desert check reads the graveyard as well as the battlefield, which means the attack trigger keeps firing long after your land base has been chewed up by removal, sacrifice, or cycling. That is the design hook. A 4/4 for five that strips a blocker off one attacker every combat is a fine but unremarkable rate; what justifies building toward it is that the enabler is durable in a way most "if you control a [permanent]" clauses are not. Most lands-matter triggers stop the moment the relevant land dies, so they live and die with your board state. This one only needs a Desert to have existed and reached the graveyard at some point, which turns a fragile attack condition into a near-permanent one for any deck running even a handful of cycling lands or sacrificial Deserts. The body and the rider are otherwise plain: it does not evade itself, it does not grow, and the trigger names a single creature to sit out combat rather than granting the Cerodon menace or true evasion, so a wall of blockers still gangs it down while one of their number stands aside. But the graveyard clause is the quiet part of the text that decides whether the card is a build-around or a curve-filler, and it rewards a deck that treats Deserts as a resource to be spent rather than a permanent to be protected.

