Sailors' Bane

A nine-mana 7/7 is nobody's finisher on rate, which is why the cost reduction is the entire design. Every instant, sorcery, or Adventure card sitting in your graveyard or exile shaves a mana off, so this Dragon Turtle rewards a deck that has already spent the game slinging spells and now wants a body that survives long enough to matter. That framing puts it in a specific corner of blue design: a payoff for spellslinger decks that usually cash out in card advantage or damage rather than a stompy threat. By the midgame, a well-fueled graveyard can drop the price into aggressive territory, and Ward 4 is there to protect the investment once it lands, taxing the single removal spell that would otherwise make the whole exercise pointless. The counting clause is the wrinkle worth reading twice: it looks at cards you own, in exile as well as the yard, so flashback, foretell, and adventure zones all feed it rather than shutting it off. It is a rate that scales with a game plan rather than a mana curve, and the 7/7 body is deliberately unexciting because the excitement is supposed to be how cheaply it arrives.