Greater Stone Spirit

Two abilities pointed in different directions, and the genuinely clever part is that they never get in each other's way. The evasion is static: it costs nothing, taps nothing, and simply means this 4/4 can swing on the ground without fear of being chumped by a flier. So the Spirit can connect in combat and dump mana into its activated ability on the very same turn; the keyword and the activation never compete for a single resource. The friction lives entirely in the conversion rate. The pump engine grants a chosen creature a toughness bump plus a repeatable power boost, one red at a time, indefinitely until end of turn. To turn that into a kill you need leftover mana late and a board worth pointing it at; the target can be the Spirit itself, but feeding it a red per single point of power is a sluggish way to spend a flood. It reads like an early-era stab at making a red top-end creature double as a mana sink, from before the design language had cleaner ways to convert excess mana into damage. The body and the engine are each defensible on their own, and because the evasion is free, they stack rather than trade off. What dates the card is the math: a red apiece for single points of power, a cost that only matters once the rest of the board has already stalled out.