Territorial Baloth

Landfall's first job was to make a routine land drop feel like a combat threat, and this is the clean common-rarity proof of concept: a 4/4 that swings as a 6/6 the moment a land you control enters that turn. The mechanic does its honest work here. Cracking a fetch, replaying a land off a bounce effect, or simply hitting your drop on curve turns the body into a moving target during combat math, and stacking a second land drop in the same turn (with extra-land enablers) layers a second +2/+2 to push it to an 8/8, past anything an opponent expected to block. The pump lasts only as long as the turn does and needs a land trigger to exist at all: hold no lands and you have a plain 4/4 for five mana, a rate nobody is impressed by. That conditionality is the lesson the mechanic was built to teach, rewarding the ramp-heavy green deck that floods the board with lands anyway and punishing the deck that treats lands as inert. Among the keyword's early designs it is the deliberately unsubtle one, showing a new player what "whenever a land enters" can mean before the costlier payoffs ask for more. The strategic axis is tempo on your own turn: the threat is largest when you are developing, smallest when you are not, lining up the beast's best moment precisely with green's natural rhythm of dropping lands.