Hunting Kavu

Defense as a transaction: this Kavu would rather negotiate a trade than block. The activation asks for the same colored payment the body cost to deploy, plus a tap, and on resolution sends both your creature and a committed attacker to exile. That double-exile is the unusual part. It is not damage prevention or a chump block; it is clean removal that ignores indestructibility, regeneration, and death triggers on both ends, at the price of giving up the Kavu in the process. The "attacking you" clause is the gate that stops it from being a general-purpose answer: it fires only during your opponent's combat, against a creature already swinging at you, and only against something on the ground. Fliers walk past it untouched. Because the exile is part of the effect rather than the cost, the ability is also vulnerable in a way a true sacrifice would not be: counter it, or kill its target in response, and the Kavu simply stays on the board with mana spent and nothing traded. When it does connect, the negotiation is strictly one-shot: a permanent for a permanent, not a renewable threat you hold across turns. That one-time exchange is why it never functions like a wall you keep around. This is the multicolor-common philosophy of an early era in miniature: a 2/3 that reads like a modest blocker but is really a deferred, body-for-body answer, priced and gated so the opponent gets a real say in whether it ever fires.