Scoria Cat

The +3/+3 bonus reads like a reward, but it functions as a tax: to swing as a 6/6, you have to drain your mana entirely and leave nothing untapped to interact on the opponent's turn. The design inverts the usual aggressive-deck instinct. Most beaters want you deploying threats while holding up tricks; this one wants you committed, mana spent, board exposed, gambling that a 6/6 attacker beats the counterspell or removal you could have kept open. The window cuts both ways. The bonus holds only while none of your lands are available, so the moment you keep a single source open for blocks or instant-speed answers, the creature collapses back to its base body. It swells precisely when you are most defenseless and deflates the instant you try to play safe, which makes its stat line a live readout of your tapped-out posture: a more honest piece of design than the plain frame lets on. The Cat shares an experimental impulse with the rhystic spells of the same period, which charged opponents for the lands they left open; both treat untapped mana as a resource worth pricing, one punishing the opponent's caution and the other rewarding your own recklessness. That mechanical preoccupation never caught on and most of its cards faded with it, but the core idea (a body that pays you for spending everything) has aged better than the experiment around it.