Lim-Dûl's Paladin

A 0/3 body that wants nothing more than to be left alone, and a stat line that exists purely to be lied about. The Paladin is built as a knot of conditional triggers, each one punishing the obvious play. It costs you a card every upkeep just to stay on the table; refuse to pay and it sacrifices itself, but it cantrips on the way out, replacing its own slot with a fresh draw. Attack into open air and it assigns no combat damage but makes the defending player lose four life, so the printed power becomes irrelevant on an unblocked swing. Get blocked and it swells to a trampling threat, turning the opponent's correct defensive instinct into a mistake. The design is a study in inverted incentives: every line of text rewards the player for doing the thing that feels wrong, and the body is deliberately useless as a baseline so the triggers carry the whole card. That the unblocked clause routes around combat damage entirely (a direct life-loss effect dressed up as an attack) makes it one of the era's stranger evasion-adjacent threats, immune to damage prevention and to tricks that fog the swing. It comes from a period of Alliances design that prized intricate per-creature rules text over clean rates, and the Paladin pushes that instinct to its edge: a creature you have to feed, that flips its math depending on whether the opponent blocks. The reward is real; the upkeep tax is the price.