Kami of the Painted Road

The reward structure is the whole appeal: protection only fires when you put a relevant tribal or storyline spell on the stack, so the body is only as evasive as your deck is committed to those spell types. Build nothing around it and you have a fragile 3/3 for five with a dormant ability; lean into a shell dense with Arcane instants and Spirit creatures and it becomes a creature that picks its own protection color in response to whatever is trying to block or kill it, on demand, every time you add to the count. The selectable color is the elegant part: you choose after you see the threat, so the same body dodges a removal spell on one turn and walks through a blocker on the next. The design belongs to the era of build-around tribal payoffs that demand you honor a deckbuilding constraint before they pay out, and the rate reflects the deal. Five mana for that body is steep, but the ceiling assumes you are stacking triggers across a turn rather than playing it in isolation. It rewards a spell-type-dense shell and punishes a generic goodstuff pile, which is exactly the line separating the cards built to anchor an archetype from the ones that merely visited it.