Sokenzan Bruiser

Conditional evasion against a single color was a recurring early-design lever, and this is its plainest expression in red's own mirror: a body that walks past any opponent fielding the basic land it most likely shares. Mountainwalk is evasion contingent on the metagame rather than the board, which makes it a strange bargain. Against a deck with no Mountains the keyword is dead text and the creature is a vanilla 3/3 for five, a rate that was unremarkable even in slower eras. Against another red deck, or anything splashing red through Mountains, it becomes unblockable, which is precisely the matchup where an undersized attacker matters least because both sides are racing. The mechanic delivers most when you need it least and vanishes exactly when you would want it, a perverse arithmetic that runs through all of basic-landwalk. Designers eventually recognized this and largely retired the keyword as a maindeckable evasion form, folding the function into more reliable shapes like menace or flying. What remains here is a clean artifact of the period when tribal warriors and color-hosed evasion were considered a fair trade for a flat statline, and when a 3/3 ogre that could sometimes not be blocked was a reasonable thing to spend five mana on.