Invasion of Belenon // Belenon War Anthem

The battle card as a race against yourself: the front face pays you immediately with a 2/2 vigilant Knight, then hands you a defense count you have to grind down before the reward flips. What makes this member of the Siege cycle notable is how gently it asks to be defeated. The token it leaves behind isn't just a body; it's a defender you can turn around and swing at your own battle, meaning the front half seeds its own conversion. Once the back face resolves, the anthem effect scales with whatever board you've built to break the siege in the first place, so the two halves reinforce each other along a single axis: go wide, then make wide bigger. The design tension the Siege template resolves is elegant. A permanent that flips on a timer would be either too slow or too free, but forcing you to commit attackers (and choosing an opponent who can throw blockers at it) prices the transformation in tempo and board space rather than mana. The Knight's vigilance is the quiet load-bearing piece: it can defend, attack the battle, and still be counted among your creatures for the anthem, letting one token do triple duty across the transform. It reads as a modest two-for-one on the front, but the whole design is built so that the payoff you get is exactly the payoff you were already working toward.