Sand Strangler

The conditional damage here reads like a Flametongue Kavu with the tax moved from mana to deckbuilding: pay the price in land choices instead of at the register, and the entry trigger does the same three-damage work. Where Flametongue Kavu and its descendants always fired, this one only shoots after you have done the land-type homework, and the trigger is forgiving about how: a Desert you still control or a Desert sitting dead in the graveyard both flip the switch. That second half carries more weight than it looks. It means a sacrificed or cycled Desert keeps paying out, so the condition rewards a deck that treats Deserts as a running theme rather than a one-time toll. The 3/3 body after the shot is incidental; the appeal is trading up on entry and leaving a creature behind, which is the structural draw of the entire removal-on-a-stick lineage. What sets it apart from most enters-the-battlefield burn is the gate itself: the rate is keyed to a tribal land subtype rather than a creature type or a graveyard count, a narrower and more deliberate ask that ties the removal to a specific manabase commitment instead of a body count.