Hipparion

A defensive body with a tax on its own defense: the 1/3 wall that wants to stop attackers but charges you a mana to stand in front of anything genuinely threatening. The design logic is a deliberate inversion of the usual early-creature wall. A 1/3 for two would otherwise blank most aggressive starts cleanly, so the printing builds in a friction valve: the toughness is there, the willingness to block is metered. Against small attackers it does its job for free; against the 3-power threats you actually need to stop, it asks for the tax precisely when blocking matters most, and the mana you spend defending is mana you are not spending elsewhere. This conditional drawback is the lever early Magic leaned on to keep cheap stats honest before keywords like defender or fixed power-tiering existed: a horse that handles the chaff and balks at the cavalry.