Thraben Sentry // Thraben Militia

The double-faced frame here does flavor work the rate alone never could: a town guardsman who only takes up arms once the bodies start falling. The front is a defensive 2/2 with vigilance, content to hold a line, but its transform trigger keys off your own creatures dying rather than any cost you pay. That makes it an aristocrats-adjacent payoff dressed as a militia card: each chump block, each sacrificed token, each unfavorable trade nudges it closer to flipping into a trampler. The interesting asymmetry is between the two faces. The front wants to stay home and absorb damage; the back wants to attack into open ground, and the death trigger bridges them. Because it keys on death rather than attrition broadly, it rewards a board built to be expendable rather than one built to win combat outright. Once flipped there is no flip back: the militia stays mobilized permanently, no longer subject to the table's whims. It belongs to the early wave of werewolf-adjacent transform designs that taught players to read the back face as the real card and the front as a holding pattern. The twist is that the flip condition is one you steer directly rather than something the opponents impose on you: feed the graveyard, and the guardsman becomes the closer.