Pride of Lions

Trample's quieter cousin, drawn before the keyword settled into its modern shape. Where trample wastes only the excess once a blocker is dead, this Cat sidesteps the blocker entirely: its static ability lets it assign all 4 to the player even when a creature stands in front, and the chump never absorbs a point. That distinction matters most against a wall of small bodies, where trample still has to feed each one its lethal share before any damage spills through; here the whole 4 lands on the controller regardless of how the gang stacks up. It stays relevant against a single larger blocker too. An opponent who throws a 5/5 in front to trade down still eats the full 4 to the face, where trample would have done nothing once the blocker survived. The catch is that the body brings no evasion of its own, so all of this only does work when the opponent volunteers to block: the 4/4 has to be threatening enough to demand a block before its damage-assignment text matters at all. That dependency is why the effect reads sharper than its frequency of use. It belongs to an era when combat-damage assignment was still being explored as its own design lever rather than folded into trample, a line of inquiry the game largely closed by refining the keyword instead.