Riparian Tiger
A green beater that arrives with its own fuel tank and a way to burn it in the same package. The two energy you get on entry are sized to fund exactly one pump: attack, pay it, and the 4/4 swings as a 6/6 trampler for that turn. That self-contained loop is the design point. Most energy payoffs of this era needed a separate generator to keep the engine fed, and outside a dedicated energy shell they sat as inert dorks. This one always does its trick at least once under its own power, which makes it castable as a plain midrange creature with no support at all. Within an energy deck the reading shifts: those two counters become a deposit into a shared pool, and the attack trigger turns into a recurring outlet that wants paying every turn the pool can spare it. The card lives on the seam between the two readings, threatening enough with a single guaranteed swing to earn the slot while scaling as the energy around it grows. The trample is quietly load-bearing too: a +2/+2 boost on an attacker the defender wants to chump means the spillover is real, converting a blocked swing into face damage instead of a wasted activation.


