Steel Leaf Champion
A 5/4 for three is already a body that outsizes its slot, and the evasion stapled on top makes it slip past most of the chump-blockers a defending player can deploy: anything with power 2 or less simply cannot stand in its way. The real cost is buried in the casting requirement. Three green pips at three mana value is a brutal color commitment, a deliberate stake in the ground that says this is a creature for mono-green and nothing else. That triple-pip tax is the tension the design is built around: the rate is pushed precisely because it punishes any deck that tries to splash it. Where most green beaters of comparable size ask for either a second color or a turn-four landing spot, this one demands purity of manabase in exchange for arriving early and hitting hard. The evasion clause is calibrated rather than absolute: it walks through tokens and mana dorks and small utility creatures, but a serious blocker still trades, so the card pressures without becoming unanswerable in combat. It belongs to the lineage of green's "reward the committed" beaters, the cards that exist to make a single-color manabase feel like an advantage rather than a constraint, and it does that work by being aggressively undercosted to anyone willing to pay the pip tax in full.
