Lupine Prototype

Five power and five toughness for two mana is a rate that breaks the curve entirely, and the cost is written into the single line that governs the body: it can neither attack nor block until at least one player has emptied their hand. That clause turns a stat-line into a deckbuilding contract. The condition reads "a player," not "you," which means your own opponent running dry can switch the creature on just as readily as you can, a wrinkle that cuts both ways depending on who runs out first. The card is a payoff bolted to a discard or hellbent strategy, inert on the battlefield until a hand bottoms out, then suddenly the largest thing in the game. It shares its logic with the front-loaded artifact bodies that overpay on stats and claw the cost back with a binary on-off switch, the way Phyrexian Dreadnought dares you to keep a 12/12. Here the switch is ongoing rather than a one-time entry cost, which makes the card a clock that only starts ticking once the resource war has already turned. The tension is honest: the moment it can swing is usually the moment the game has tipped one way or another anyway, so the question is never whether the 5/5 is good but whether you can engineer the empty-hand condition on your terms, before the player who emptied first finds a way to refill.