Undead Leotau

The red activation is the tell that this Zombie Cat belongs to a brief era when black-red graveyard aggression was a deliberate design pillar. The pump reads like an upside but actively shrinks the body: it trades toughness for power, so at 3/4 it can keep swinging for more while bleeding out from the bottom. That math only makes sense under unearth, where the creature comes back hasty, attacks once, and exiles itself at the next end step no matter what. You are not asking it to survive; you are asking it to convert recursion mana into a final point of reach and then leave. The ability and the unearth window are engineered to operate together: when the body is returning for one hasty swing and exiling regardless, pumping it on the way out costs nothing, because it was never going to live through the attack anyway. On a hard cast the pump is dead weight, since you actually want the 3/4 to block and stick around; from the graveyard, it becomes pure lethal arithmetic. The card is plainly built for the second use. That is the coherent thought underneath a modest creature: unearth turned graveyard fodder into a second tempo play rather than just a body to chump with, and the self-shrinking pump exists to squeeze the last damage out of a reanimation that was always one-and-done.