Stonehorn Dignitary

A 1/4 body that asks for nothing in combat and gives nothing back: this is a card built entirely around a re-triggerable promise on the way in. Skipping an opponent's combat phase once is a tempo blink, not a strategy, which is why the design only matters when you give it a way to come back. Pair the enter-trigger with a means to repeatedly return it to play (a flicker effect, a recursion loop, a sacrifice-and-rebuy engine) and the one-shot becomes a lock: an opponent who never reaches a combat phase never attacks, never races, never closes. The body is the tell. At 1/4 it is not a threat and not really a blocker either, just a durable shell for an ability the designers clearly expected to be abused, because a 1/4 that taxes one combat phase is fine and a 1/4 that taxes every combat phase ends games on its own clock. The single named target and the single-phase scope keep it honest in a vacuum; the moment a deck supplies repetition, those limits evaporate. That gap between what the card does alone and what it does inside an engine is the whole design: a deliberately underpowered creature whose ceiling lives entirely in someone else's interaction. On its own it reads as filler, until a control or value shell makes it the centerpiece, and then it stops being a creature and becomes a clock no one else gets to run.