Gluttonous Zombie

Fear reads as clean and powerful on paper: an attacker most boards simply cannot stop, since artifact creatures and black creatures are the only legal interceptors. But the keyword was once treated as premium enough to tax heavily, and here the tax fell entirely on the body. A 3/3 that connects against any deck short on black or artifact blockers should cost a fraction of what it does; the price reflects a design vocabulary that still considered unblockable-adjacent attacks a luxury worth overpaying for. The job was modest enough: a reliable, if expensive, way to push damage through a developing board, the kind of top-end beater that teaches newer players how evasion wins races. What makes it worth a second look is not the rate but the lineage. Fear is a keyword the game no longer prints, retired once its function was absorbed into intimidate and then menace, broader and cleaner evasion language that no longer carded out artifact creatures as a quirky exception. This is a fossil of that earlier grammar: a mechanic premium enough to demand a five-mana surcharge, welded to stats that have aged into a relic of how the rules once spoke about getting through. The cost is not a misprice so much as a record of priorities, a moment when the ability to slip past most defenders was rationed like a resource rather than handed out as a baseline.