Gruul Nodorog

Six mana for a 4/4 was never near the curve, and the red activation bolted onto this one was never meant to fix that math: paying for end-of-turn menace is a guild-pact trinket, a flavor stamp more than a rate adjustment. The structural problem is that menace on a 4/4 only matters when the body is already too small to demand a double-block on its own, and a 4/4 mostly isn't; against the boards where two-for-one blocking is realistic, the four power gets traded away before the keyword ever bites. What the design does communicate cleanly is the two-color identity of the era it comes from: a green creature whose only red trait is a splashable activation, the kind of build-around-nothing beater that fleshed out a guild's roster when the whole point was selling players on color pairs. The through-line worth noting is the repeatable, color-pip-gated keyword grant: a green body buying a red ability one mana at a time. Later designs refined the same shape into activations that actually swing combat math, but here the effect is a label rather than a lever, an evasion grant on a creature too big to need it and too slow to make it count.