Jade Statue

A threat that is not a creature until you need it to be, and therefore one the opponent cannot profitably remove. The statue sits on the battlefield as an inert artifact, costing nothing to leave there, and converts to a 3/6 body only when combat actually breaks out. Gating the transformation to the combat step is the discipline that prices the card: it cannot be animated at instant speed during the rest of the turn to ambush a spell or pad a board state outside of fighting. The stats reinforce the concept. A power figure that trades up against the era's commons and a toughness figure that survived a Lightning Bolt with room to spare, meaning the conversion was almost always favorable when blades crossed. What sells the design is the answer-resistance: most removal of the day could not touch an artifact, and creature removal could not touch a statue, so the opponent had to respect a body that was only a body for a few moments at a time. The lineage runs alongside Mishra's Factory and the creature-lands that followed it: the statue is the cruder, artifact-colored cousin, less flexible (no evasion, no convenient mana floor) but operating on the same principle that a permanent which dodges your removal slot for free is worth more than its combat stats alone suggest.