Silent Arbiter

A 1/5 body that taxes every combat down to a single duel: that is the whole point, and it cuts both ways. The construct rewrites the most fundamental assumption of the attack step, that a player can send a whole board across the table at once, and reduces it to one attacker against one blocker. For a control or stax deck, that conversion is brutal: a wide aggressive board becomes a trickle, and the Arbiter's own toughness means it survives most of what a single attacker can throw at it while never needing to swing back. The symmetry is the leash. You feel the restriction too, so this is a card for decks that win without combat or win with one big creature anyway, the rare beater you can afford to point through a clogged board. What makes the design durable is that it is a creature rather than an enchantment: it can be tutored as an artifact, recurred, blinked, and crucially answered by the same removal that handles any blocker, which keeps the lock from being oppressive in the way a permanent rules-rewrite enchantment would be. It belongs to the small family of permanents that constrain how combat math is allowed to work rather than who survives it, and it does that work cheaper and more flexibly than most of them.