Knight of the Pilgrim's Road

A 3/2 for that must be dealt with the moment it enters, because the reward for a single unblocked hit is baked into the card: connect once and it becomes a 4/3, and the trigger never fires again. That front-loading is the whole point. Renown asks the opponent one question at the first attack step and forces a bad answer to all three options: trade now while the numbers are even, chump a body that will only get bigger, or accept a faster clock. A 3/2-into-4/3 sits at exactly the size where none of those feels clean. The counter is permanent but one-shot, which distinguishes renown from the open-ended growth of level-up creatures or graft: it hands out a fixed bump and then stops demanding investment, so the card stays a beater rather than a snowball that has to be answered twice. This is the tidiest possible delivery vehicle for a mechanic about pressure, dropped onto the curve slot where pressure does the most work: cheap enough to come down early, big enough that letting it through has a real cost.