Kranioceros

A 5/2 for five mana is a body designed to die in combat: the power is real, the toughness embarrasses it against almost any blocker that swings back. The fix lives entirely in one gold-cost line, and it carries a deliberate friction in its color: this is a red creature whose only defensive switch costs white mana. That cross-color tax was the whole point of cards built around the multicolor pressures of their era, where a deck dipping into a second color got rewarded for it and a mono-red deck found the line of text inert. Spend the two mana once and the 5/2 becomes a 5/5 that trades up or survives; spend it again during a blocking step and the math swings further. Because the boost is repeatable and unrestricted, a stalled board with white mana to spare turns a glass-cannon attacker into a wall that punches. The balancing weight is the rate of that tax: every +0/+3 demands a full two mana of a color the creature itself does not produce, so attacking and arming it pull against each other, and rarely line up early. A pure midrange role-player whose identity sits in that single white activation: aggressive when you are tapped out, durable when you are not, and dependent on a manabase that can reach two colors to be either.