Masked Bandits
The activated ability is the whole design argument, and it works by charging a tax against your own tempo. Two mana and the card exiled from hand hands any land a Jund-shard mana source, which is exactly the fixing a greedy six-drop like this needs to be castable on curve. The trick is that the exile is not a discard: the card stays castable from exile for as long as the land holds the granted ability, so the "sacrifice" is really a loan you call back once the fixing has smoothed out the rest of your hand. That reframes a fat body with an unremarkable stat line into an early enabler that unsticks a difficult manabase and then still shows up later as a 5/5 with vigilance and menace. The menace is what keeps the creature relevant past the ramp phase; a five-power attacker that demands two blockers, and can hold the fort thanks to vigilance, is hard to trade with profitably. Designs that let one card function as a fixer early and a threat late usually pay for the flexibility in raw stats, and this one is no exception: the body is plain for the printed cost, because in the games where it mattered the cost was never really six mana at all. It is a fixer first and a beater second, built for the color trio that most wants both jobs handled by a single card.


