Warlord's Elite

A 4/4 for that pays its discount in tempo rather than mana: the additional cost taps two untapped artifacts, creatures, and/or lands you already control, so the rate is real but it comes out of your board rather than your manabase. This is the old "reveal a creature" or "sacrifice a creature" school of drawback, reworked into a tap tax, and it lives in a peculiar seam of white aggro design. You want to cast it when you have spare untapped permanents whose immediate value is already spent: a mana dork you were not going to activate, a spent artifact, a land you were not spending this turn. Because artifacts count, it leans toward decks that flood the board with cheap noncreature permanents, giving you fodder to tap that costs you nothing. The friction runs the other direction from most curve fillers: a hand with this and nothing else does nothing on turn three, because with no untapped permanents there is no way to pay the cost. So the card punishes an empty board rather than rewarding a full one, and that reversal is what makes it strange. It does not want to come down first; it wants to come down second or third, after you have committed a few permanents. A body priced below rate for a deck that has already invested in the battlefield, and a brick for one that has not.