Hunter Sliver

Provoke on a Sliver marries two design philosophies that rarely share a card: a swarm-tribe keyword-granter and a targeted combat manipulator. Most Sliver lords hand the whole table an offensive boost, more damage or evasion or recursion. This one grants provoke instead, turning every attacker into a potential dare: a defending creature untaps and is forced to block whether its controller wants the exchange or not. The key word is "may." The attacker chooses, every time, which creature to drag out and whether to drag one at all, so the keyword never commits you to combat you would lose. In a board with enough lords stacking power, that choice becomes lethal: provoke summons a key blocker forward, the buffed body kills it on the spot, and the swarm walks through the gap it leaves behind. It is removal dressed as a combat keyword, wrapped in a 1/1 frame so the shared-engine math resolves in the controller's favor. The symmetry is real (an opponent running Slivers gets provoke too), but the asymmetry of who's attacking decides who benefits in any given combat. Of all the abilities handed to the whole tribe at once during this era's Sliver design pass, provoke is among the few that asks the pilot to make a real decision before swinging: not just how wide to go, but which creature, exactly, they want dead first.