Keeper of Tresserhorn
Send a 6/6 into an open lane and it deals no combat damage at all, dealing the defending player a flat 2 life loss instead. Put a single creature in the way and the trigger never fires, so the body fights as an ordinary 6/6 and swings for its full six. That fork is the whole transaction, and the routing matters more than the number. When the trigger does fire, the 2 life loss steps around damage prevention, around any soaking a blocker might offer, around effects that switch off combat damage, and around power being whittled by a stack of -X/-X: a Keeper reduced toward 1 power still bleeds the same 2 through an open lane that its battered combat math no longer could. The constraint that makes the rate work is the blocker math itself: the life loss fires only on an unblocked attack, so one chump in the path shuts the whole thing off. The card wants a board where the lane is already clear, and pays that clear path back with an assault the usual defensive toolkit cannot interact with. It reads as a flavor-forward oddity of its era, an Avatar whose strike lands more like a curse laid on the defender than a swing of the blade, a design that prizes a guaranteed, prevention-proof clock over the raw output its body suggests.
