Karplusan Strider

The protection clause is narrower than it sounds and sharper for it: this 3/4 can't be the target of blue or black spells, which walls off the point-removal those two colors lean on without granting blanket immunity. The Doom Blades, the Terrors, the bounce that picks one creature off the board: none of them can name this Yeti. Abilities still get through, so an opposing Man-o'-War can bounce it via its enters-the-battlefield trigger; the card answers spell-based removal, not every removal effect in the color pie. That distinction is the whole design. Green's recurring weakness has always been that it builds big bodies and then pays for them by being soft to cheap targeted removal, and this resolves the tension for exactly the matchups where it bites hardest. Against the blue-black control decks that win by killing each threat one at a time, the outs that remain are a deliberately narrowed set: sacrifice and sweeper effects, and edicts (which name the player rather than the creature, slipping past the protection entirely). The 3/4 for four is unremarkable on its own, and that is the point. This is a creature whose value lives almost entirely in two of the five colors: a threat sized to the games where blue and black sit across the table, and a near-blank body everywhere else. It is hate in the shape of a beater, hostile only to the opponents it was built to frustrate.