Shambling Ghoul

A 2/3 for two mana is a rate that would ordinarily read as a small push; the entering-tapped clause is the tax that brings it back down. Because it comes in tapped, it cannot block on the same turn it resolves and cannot attack until your next one, so the opponent gets a free swing before the wall goes up. That is the oldest balancing lever in the game, the same trade early dual lands paid in a slower manabase and comes-into-play-tapped bodies have paid in tempo for decades. The 2/3 statline itself is genuinely sturdy defense at this cost: it walls most early aggression, survives the common one-toughness pings, and trades up against pushed two-drops. What the tapped line does is push it toward defense on purpose. You want to deploy it on a turn when you are not relying on it to interact immediately, banking on it stonewalling from the following turn onward. This is a measured-rate common, built to give a black aggro or midrange shell a resilient early body without handing that shell a two-drop that outclasses the slot. Nothing here reaches past the printed text, and the restraint is the whole point: a body this hard to kill for this little has to refund something, and the tapped entry is the exact size of that refund.