Warden of the Chained

A 4/4 trampler for three is priced below the curve by any measure, and the design pays for that rate with a leash rather than a shrunken body: it stays home unless another power-4-or-greater creature stands beside it. That clause inverts the usual big-creature curve. Most beaters this size want to land early and swing; this one wants to arrive after a threat is already online, making it a payoff for a board rather than the start of one. The condition reads as a drawback but functions as a synergy gate: it rewards decks committed to fat, hard-to-block bodies, where a second power-4 creature is the plan and not an accident. It also disarms the exact thing that makes cheap beaters dangerous, deploying alone into an open board on turn three, which is precisely when a 4/4 trampler would be most oppressive. The result is a creature that reads as a bargain or a brick depending entirely on the shape of the rest of your deck, and that binary is what the constraint exists to enforce. Green-red aggro rarely lacks for oversized creatures, so the leash is less a tax than a nudge toward building the kind of board where a trampling 4/4 for three was always going to sit comfortably inside the game plan.