Josu Vess, Lich Knight

The kicker here is a coin you can only afford to flip late, and the design is built entirely around making that acceptable. A 4/5 with menace for four mana is a fine fair-game body on its own, which it has to be: the floor is playable so the ceiling can be a mana sink you sit on until the game slows down. Pay the kicker and the same card drops nine bodies onto the board at once (Josu itself plus eight 2/2 tokens), every one of them carrying menace. That shared keyword is the point of the token half. Go-wide black usually leans on small fliers or disposable chumps that dilute their threat as they multiply; here the swarm scales its pressure with its width, because a defender who can only pair up blockers cannot cleanly stop an army where every attacker demands two bodies to stop it. The structure is deliberately bimodal, with no scaling middle reward: you either cast a serviceable four-drop early or hold the card as a one-shot horde you uncork when the mana arrives. That is kicker working the way it works best, letting a single card fill two unrelated roles across a game without ever sitting dead in hand. The legendary undead-general flavor of a knight raising an instant battalion reads as theater, but the mechanical truth is plainer: one card, one choice between tempo now and overwhelming force later, committed to fully whichever way you break.