Joven's Ferrets

A green one-drop whose entire identity lives in what happens when it gets blocked. The +0/+2 on attack is the smaller half of the design, a face-up trigger that turns the body into a 1/3 in combat; the real teeth come at end of combat, where every creature that blocked this particular Ferret gets tapped and held down through its controller's next untap step. That is a tempo tax dressed as a small attacker: send the Ferrets in, and the defender chooses between eating a single point of damage or committing blockers that will sit useless for a full turn cycle. The toughness pump compounds the problem, since the 1/3 survives the tiny bodies an opponent would otherwise throw under it to trade. The tap only fires against creatures that actually stand in front of the Ferrets, which is the friction baked into the design: an opponent who declines to block pays nothing at all, takes a single point, and the abilities never resolve into anything meaningful. As mechanical history, this is an early experiment in bolting a soft Icy Manipulator effect onto a creature's combat step, paying for the disruption with a body so small the rate barely registers. It rewards a board state its era's green decks rarely produced: a wide swing where one creature's locked-down blockers open a lane for everything else.