Stratadon
Domain was Invasion block's reward for stretching your mana across all five colors, and Stratadon is the discount taken to its logical extreme: a printed cost of ten that a fully realized five-type manabase shaves down to a five-mana 5/5 with trample. The artifact type line is what makes that math reachable for any deck willing to play the colors, since the body needs no colored pips and the discount keys off basic land types rather than mana symbols. The design tension here is between the bloated nominal cost and the actual payoff. At one or two basic types it is a parody of a fair card; at four or five it is a clean beater that arrives ahead of curve. It encodes a deckbuilding incentive directly into its mana cost, asking you to assemble the rainbow not for spell access but for raw rate on a single fatty. That is a different kind of reward structure than most ramp or cost reducers, which care about how much mana you have rather than how many flavors of land. Stratadon never anchored a defining strategy, but as a teaching piece for what domain was built to do, it states the mechanic's thesis more bluntly than almost anything else in the cycle: the more colors you commit to, the cheaper your investment gets.

