Tomakul Honor Guard

Green two-drops that hit for three have always run on the same trade: aggressive stats, negligible defense, one removal spell and it's gone. A 3/1 for two sits squarely inside that lineage, but Ward quietly rewrites the math on the fragile end of it. The problem with a glass-cannon body isn't the toughness so much as the tempo swing when it dies to a cheap spell: your opponent spends one mana, you lose your two-drop and your turn's pressure. Taxing the removal by two mana turns that clean answer into a genuine decision. A first-swing 3/1 that demands three-plus total mana to kill is doing the aggressor's job of buying time by making itself annoying to remove rather than by surviving combat. The design is honest about what it's protecting: Ward defends against targeted interaction, not blockers or sweepers, so the card still folds to a chump or a board wipe. What it fixes is the specific weakness that made cheap green beaters unreliable, the one-for-one that costs less than the creature it kills. It's a small structural adjustment to a very old template, and the kind of tax that reads as minor until you're the one deciding whether a full turn spent answering a two-mana creature is worth it.