Mtenda Lion

Premium green aggression on rate with the off switch deliberately wired into the opposing color: the defending player can buy out of the combat damage entirely by spending a single blue. This is the "pay an off-color tax to neutralize" template that Mirage block leaned on across several creatures, and the design tension runs sharper than the cheap body suggests. Blue is precisely the color most likely to be holding up loose mana on a defensive turn, so the lion's effective power is set by the opponent's open mana rather than its own toughness. Against a tapped-out board it hits every turn; against an untapped blue mage it shrinks to a creature that taxes one mana per swing and deals nothing for the trouble. The friction is asymmetric by design. Paying the blue is optional, so the defender only spends when those two points actually matter, which quietly turns the attack step into a mana-drain in matchups where blue is sitting on counterspell mana it would rather keep. That is an idea the color pie has mostly retired: green's raw efficiency priced against another color's willingness to spend, rather than against a hard restriction printed on the card itself. The cost of the lion is real, but the opponent pays it, one tapped Island at a time.