Slash Panther

A 4/2 with haste that swings the turn it lands is a body that lives or dies on its mana cost, and that Phyrexian pip is the entire experiment. Pay the red and it costs five; pay two life and it costs four, off any color of mana at all. The pitch is colorless aggression: a hasty four-power attacker you can run in a deck with no red sources, settling the color tax in life rather than mana. That trade is the recurring flaw with Phyrexian mana on creatures, though. The life you spend to skip the color requirement is life you no longer have to race with, and a 2-toughness body that has already cost you two life trades down to almost anything. The design lands on a tension it never resolves: the more you want to splash it into a deck that cannot produce red, the worse the life payment stings, because those are exactly the decks least equipped to win before the chip damage catches up. Where it works is the all-in colorless beatdown shell that treats its own life total as fuel to be spent toward zero on its own terms, the artifact-aggro lineage that wants four power attacking immediately and does not care which color paid for it.