Ubul Sar Gatekeepers
Every member of the Gatekeeper cycle runs the same conditional: a body that delivers a meaningful enters trigger only once you control two or more Gates, and a stripped-down rate if you have not. The black version asks its threshold of a manabase that treats Gates (a specific land subtype) as color fixing rather than mere lands. Meet the count and the enters trigger fires a Disfigure stapled to a 2/4, killing most early creatures and shrinking anything larger into removal range. Miss it and you have a four-mana 2/4 with no payout, which is the design's honest cost: the -2/-2 is genuinely strong removal-on-a-body, so warping your lands around the Gate subtheme is the price the card extracts for that rate. The toughness matters more here than the power; because the trigger fires as the creature enters rather than during combat, the value is in landing on your own turn, pruning a threat from the board, then leaving a 2/4 that outlasts most of what the -2/-2 itself would have killed. This is one more entry in the lineage of black creatures that fold removal into a body, but the Gate condition turns it from a default include into a build-around: the card only earns its full rate inside a deck that has already decided its lands are a resource worth caring about.

