Sparring Golem

The math runs backwards from how gang-blocking is supposed to work. Pile bodies onto an attacker and you normally trade up cheaply: three small creatures kill one, no matter how big. Here every blocker the defender commits hands this Golem another +1/+1, so a clean gang-block inflates the very thing it was meant to dismantle. One blocker makes it a 3/3, enough to trade with most early creatures. Three blockers swell it to a 5/5, large enough to drag a body down with it and survive the exchange. The card is a deterrent wearing a beater's stats: the threat of the pump does most of the work, since a defender who does the arithmetic often decides not to block at all. The boost only resolves once combat is locked, which is the restriction that keeps it fair: it can never force damage through an empty board, and any removal aimed at it before blocks are declared leaves an unpumped 2/2 to die. As a colorless artifact body it slots into any deck willing to attack into a stalled position, where the question it poses to the defending player (how many creatures is killing this actually worth?) is the entire point.