Monstrous Hound
The whole body is gated behind a manabase comparison: it can't attack unless you control more lands than the defending player, and it can't block unless you control more than the attacker. That is a clean inversion of how red usually prices its bodies. Red buys undercosted stats by bolting on a drawback the aggressive player can ignore (Ball Lightning sacrifices itself, Goblin Cohort demands you keep swinging), but this one punishes whoever falls behind on lands, which is exactly the player most likely to be the beatdown. So a stat line that promises tempo plays as a control payoff: it stays inert for the land-light player no matter how the board develops, and only comes online once you have out-developed the table. It rewards the grinding game and goes dead in the race, the opposite of where a fat red creature wants to live. Exodus leaned hard on conditional drawback creatures that tied a generous body to some battlefield state you had to satisfy first, and Monstrous Hound is among the starker examples: stats that read as a finisher, text that quietly insists you earn the land war before the creature does anything at all.


