Starport Security

Four mana to tap a single creature is a rate nobody signs up for, and the design knows it: the printed cost is a decoy. The subject is the discount. Field any creature carrying a +1/+1 counter and the activation collapses to two mana, which is where a sluggish, repeatable tapper turns into a genuine turn-by-turn lock: freeze a blocker before your attack, or pin down an attacker before combat, and do it again next turn. That conditional is the card's real deckbuilding hook, because it doesn't ask you to build around it so much as ask whether your board already deals in counters; the enabler you were running anyway becomes the switch that powers the Robot Soldier. The catch lives in the seam between payoff and enabler. Without a counter anywhere on your side, this is a 1/1 charging four mana for a modest tap, and even fully discounted the ability is a tap, not removal, so whatever it stops shrugs free the following turn. That makes it a piece for the grind rather than the decisive exchange: its ceiling tracks how far a deck has leaned into the counters economy, and its floor is a body that mostly stands around waiting for one to appear.