Thing from the Deep
A nine-mana 9/9 with a leash, which is the part worth dwelling on. This came from a starter product, a teaching set meant to introduce the game with clean, mostly-vanilla creatures and easy combat math, and the big fatties got drawback text not to balance them against constructed play (this was never meant to mingle with the rest of Magic) but to model a recurring early-design idea: the enormous sea monster that demands tribute to keep swinging. Here that tribute is an Island sacrificed every time the creature attacks, a self-cannibalizing manabase that bleeds you out as fast as the body threatens to win. It is the same flavor logic that ran through the Leviathans of the era, the notion that something this large should slowly drown the player commanding it. What the trigger really costs you is structural: each swing strips a land, so the more you press the advantage the faster your mana shrinks, and a long game with this on the table is a countdown to having no Islands left to feed it. As a design artifact it captures the period when "big creature with a leash" was a genre unto itself, before deathtouch, trample, and protected bodies made raw size cheap. The leash, not the body, is the thing.
