Su-Chi Cave Guard

The classic Su-Chi rewired for the modern era. The original was a 4/4 for four that gave you four colorless when it died, a body-and-Moxen-in-one built to fuel the biggest artifact ramp of its time. This oversized descendant doubles every number: an 8/8 for eight that refunds all eight mana on death, and crucially prints that mana as ritual-style burst you don't lose to phase transitions. There lies the whole design. The death trigger isn't insurance against losing the creature; it's a designed handoff, letting you sacrifice or trade the Cave Guard and immediately relaunch its full mana into something equally expensive without missing a beat. Vigilance keeps it swinging without dropping its guard, and Ward makes the cheap removal that would otherwise blunt the plan cost as much as the payoff you're chasing. The design reads as a study in how much has changed since colorless mana rocks came in cheap and fragile: where the ancestor asked you to build around four floating mana on a body that died easily, this one wants to die on purpose, on your terms, into a game-ending turn. It is a top-end payoff and a mana battery folded into a single card, priced so the reward only lands if you already had the ramp to deploy it and the follow-up worth eight fresh mana.