Hewed Stone Retainers
A 4/4 for three mana with no evasion or upside is a body that should never see print: that rate cracks the curve open if you can deploy it freely. The casting restriction is the whole ledger entry that buys it back. You cannot lead a turn with this; it has to come second, after you have already committed mana and a card to something else, which means the discount is real only in decks built to chain spells anyway. That gates the Golem into a narrow band of aggressive or storm-adjacent shells where you were going to cast multiple spells regardless, and turns a vanilla beater into a payoff for a sequencing pattern rather than a curve-filler. It belongs to a small family of cards that price their stats below the bend and tax the cast instead, the inverse of the usual artifact-creature bargain where you overpay in colorless for flexibility. Here the colorless cost is cheap and the tempo cost is steep: the second spell of your turn is precisely when your mana is thinnest, so a 4/4 that lands then is doing more lifting than the mana value suggests. Outside a deck that meets the condition organically, it is a creature you simply cannot play, which is the cleanest possible expression of the design: enormous when the restriction is invisible, dead the moment it is not.
