Takeno, Samurai General

The bushido lord, and the cleanest expression of why that keyword wanted a payoff. Bushido was a combat keyword built around restraint: it does nothing until a creature is in combat, and then only on the turn it blocks or is blocked. That conditional made the mechanic notoriously hard to build around, since the power was invisible most of the time. The second ability converts that latent stat boost into a permanent, always-on anthem, granting each other Samurai a static +1/+1 per point of bushido it carries. A team of Bushido 1 Samurai walks around at +1/+1 at all times rather than only when blocking, and a Bushido 2 creature gets +2/+2 always. What gives this card its bite is that bushido was deliberately a defensive, situational keyword, and the lord clause unbinds it from the combat trigger entirely, reading the keyword's printed number as raw anthem fuel. The body delivering this is modest and carries its own Bushido 2, so it grows in the fight it picks, but the value lives in that static clause: it retroactively makes every prior Samurai's bushido relevant outside combat. A tribe defined by a finicky, easy-to-misvalue keyword suddenly had a top-end worth assembling around, the linchpin the rest of the Samurai roster was implicitly waiting for.