Spire Golem

Affinity for Islands is the version of the mechanic that never threatened to break anything, and that is the design point worth dwelling on. The artifact-lands deck that defined Darksteel-era affinity was built on lands that were themselves artifacts, so every card's cost fell whether you ran islands or not. Tie the discount to a basic land type instead and the deck has to choose: play enough Islands to make the golem cheap, and you are leaning into a color the affinity shell did not otherwise need. The result is a 2/4 flier that a mono-blue or heavily blue board can deploy for very little, but only at the cost of running a real blue manabase rather than the artifact-land engine that made affinity infamous. The body is deliberately defensive: four toughness blocks the small fliers and aggressive ground creatures of its era, and evasion lets it chip in without committing to combat. This was affinity engineered to be color-locked rather than color-free, a tax that any blue deck could pay but no colorless artifact pile could exploit for free, and that single constraint is what separates it from the mechanic's banned and restricted cousins.