Urza's Avenger

A modal keyword vendor stapled to a 4/4 body, priced at the rate early artifacts charged for breadth of effect: six mana up front and then a recurring cost of stats rather than mana. Each activation shrinks the creature by a point of power and a point of toughness to rent out one of four keywords, so the card is built around the tension of how many abilities you actually want in a given combat. One flying point to clear the air, one trample point to push through chump blockers, one first strike point to win a fight on the ground; stack them and the 4/4 quickly becomes a 1/1 with a fistful of keywords, which captures the whole gag in a single combat math problem. The design is a relic of the period when evergreen keywords were still treated as scarce, premium resources worth a stat tax to access. Banding sitting in the menu alongside the other three dates the card precisely to the brief window when banding was marketed as a headline ability rather than the rules-text liability it became. As a Shapeshifter that literally reshapes itself each turn, the flavor and the mechanics line up more cleanly than most early artifact creatures managed, even if the rate never made the card a genuine threat. The point was never the body; it was the menu, and the cost of reading too far down it.