Revenant Patriarch
Pay nothing but black and the result is a 4/3 that can't block, fronting an enters trigger that does nothing at all: a flawed attacker that hands the opponent no answer and asks for none. The reward is bolted to the white pip. Spend alongside the black, and the same Spirit lands with a combat-denial rider that strips a player of their next attack step. This is early splash-reward design, a black creature whose best version asks for a black-white shell willing to fund a single off-color mana for a tempo swing. The structural oddity is how the two halves pull apart: the body is a liability on defense (it can't block, and three toughness folds to most removal), while the trigger only matters when you're the one staring down a clock. The card is built to end a race rather than survive one, yet the skipped combat phase is a single beat of delay, not a lock. You buy one turn, not a wall. That mismatch (a beater that won't defend, fused to a stall that pays off only under pressure) is the real curiosity here, a remnant of a period when Wizards was probing how much of a mono-colored card's payoff it could hide behind a second color's mana, without printing a hybrid symbol at all.

