The Howling Abomination
Most creatures flinch when a spell points their way; this 5/5 profits from it. Target it with your own removal, an aura, even a pump spell, and it swings back with a +2/+2 and two damage to every opponent, turning what would normally be a tempo cost into a reach clock. The body works less like a threat you protect and more like a lightning rod you deliberately zap, and the design assumes the person aiming spells at it is you. The natural shell is a spells-dense red-green build where you feed your own targeting, buffing it repeatedly across a turn while chipping opponents down two at a time. That same output of cheap spells flips on the conditional trample once three have hit the stack, so the evasion and the pump reliably arrive in the same window. The two rewards fold into a single incentive: cast more, aim more here, and the creature scales with exactly how far you lean into the plan. Haste is what makes the punishment land now rather than later; both the trample and the target-triggered damage can go off the turn it enters, before anyone gets to weigh whether removing it is worth the recoil. It is a threat built to invert the arithmetic of interaction, punishing the opponent for engaging and rewarding you for engaging with it yourself.
