Mystic Crusader

Two of the three colors most likely to kill a small white attacker are simply switched off here: black's removal can't touch it, red's burn can't reach it, and that protection is live before threshold ever comes online. For aggressive white decks of its era, that meant a turn-three body walking through the two colors built to punish exactly those decks. The threshold half is where the design grows teeth: fill the graveyard to seven cards and a 2/1 ground-pounder becomes a 3/2 flier, trading a fragile early curve-filler for an evasive threat the same removal still cannot answer. The tension is the build-around. Protection from black and red wants you to attack early and force the issue; threshold wants you to dump cards and play the longer game. The card sits at the seam between those two plans, rewarding a deck that does both: cheap pressure first, then escalation once the yard is stocked. As a statement of what threshold was designed to do, it lands cleanly: a creature that doesn't merely improve when the graveyard fills but changes its combat role entirely, from a vulnerable two-power attacker into something the ground can no longer hold.