River Kaijin

Pure defense, priced to the gram. The 1/4 body is the platonic blocker: it survives almost every early aggressive creature it stands in front of, contributes nothing to a clock, and asks the opponent to commit two attackers or a burn spell to break through. Designs in this mold trade all offensive upside for a toughness number tuned to brick the curve below it, and the appeal has always been the same: stall the ground for a control or tempo deck while the real plan assembles. The Spirit type and the wall-in-creature's-clothing framing are flavor dressing on a function as old as the game's first defensive bears, but the rate here is sharper than most early-era versions managed, since a four-toughness blocker for three is hard for two-power attackers to muscle past without help. What it does not do is recur, draw, or pivot to offense; it is a single-purpose speed bump, and its whole value is contingent on the format below it being fast enough to need walling. When the ground war matters, this is among the cleanest answers in its color to early creature pressure. When it does not, it is a 1/4 that does nothing, and that binary is the honest measure of the design.