Hollow Warrior

The whole design lives in the drawback, and it is an unusually backloaded one: a baseline 4/4 for four that demands, every time it wants to attack or block, that you tap an untapped creature not already committed to combat. The tax is paid as attackers and blockers are declared, not on the stack, which means it sidesteps the moment a normal creature commits and instead bills you during the one phase where holding a body back hurts most. The requirement is flat: exactly one spare creature, no more, but the consequence of not having one is total. An empty board turns this golem inert, unable even to block; a board with a single expendable body lets it swing or hold the line while quietly conscripting a token or an otherwise idle attacker to satisfy the cost. That inversion is the point. Most creatures with a rider pay their penalty once, at cast; here the cost recurs every combat step for as long as the thing lives, and it asks your deck to always keep at least one untapped creature in reserve to feed it. It belongs to the tradition of creatures whose stat line is honest but whose printed condition only resolves favorably when the rest of your board cooperates: a fair body on the curve that, in isolation, does less than its numbers suggest, and earns its keep only in a deck built wide enough to never run out of tappers.