Topiary Panther

Green has been getting these split-personality cards for a while now: creatures priced for the top of a curve with a cheap cycling clause stapled on, so the card never sits dead in an opening hand. Here the two halves are honestly evaluated. Six mana buys a 6/5 trampler, a fine but unspectacular finisher; instead fetches a basic when the game needs land and a body would only clog the draw. The design trick is that basic landcycling smooths the very curve the creature caps. A hand short on lands discards the Panther for green fixing early; a hand flooded on lands casts it late as a threat that pushes damage through chump blockers. You rarely regret drawing it, which is the entire point of the archetype: cyclers exist to keep the deck's mana consistent without diluting its threat count. The trample is the detail that keeps the late-game mode relevant rather than a pure fail-safe, since a 6/5 that gets chumped forever is just a bad topdeck. Nothing about the rate is pushed, and that restraint is deliberate; a card meant to be a flexible role-player, castable or cyclable, cannot also be a bomb without warping the decks it lands in. It is a smoothing tool first and a beater second, and it is built so the choice between those two modes is made by the board state rather than by the deckbuilder.