Supreme Exemplar

Champion was the mechanic built to reward tribal density by eating its own kind: the creature you exile to keep this on the battlefield is gone from play until this one leaves the battlefield, at which point your fodder returns. That tradeoff is the whole calculus. A 10/10 flier for seven is a finisher rate by any measure, but the body only sticks if you already control another Elemental to feed it, and that exiled creature loses its triggers, its blocking, its tap abilities for as long as the giant flies. So the card asks for a board you can afford to dismantle: a token, a spent attacker, something whose presence on the battlefield matters less than the 10/10 it props up. The wrinkle is that Champion daisy-chains in a way that punishes greed. If the creature you exile was itself championing something, that link does not pay you twice when this one dies. And because leaving the battlefield is what triggers a Champion's return, you can build a fragile stack where one removal spell on this card returns its exiled creature, but exiling a second-tier champion to fuel it has already returned that one's prisoner the moment it left. As a tribal payoff it is unsubtle: most Elemental decks want the swarm, not a single enormous threat that demands a sacrifice to land. But as the ceiling of what Champion could buy you in a body, the rate is honest about its cost. You are not getting a 10/10 flier for seven mana. You are renting it against a creature you already paid for.