Zhalfirin Commander

Most flankers from Mirage operated as standalone aggressors, punishing chump-blockers and moving on. This one was built to anchor a squad. The activated pump targets Knights specifically (itself included), so a board of attackers can grow one at a time, and the flanking sitting on this body means a defender who blocks the Commander is staring down a creature that shrinks the blocker before combat damage resolves. The interaction the design wants is a combat ambush: send the team in, let a defender commit a body it thinks trades evenly, then sink into an attacker after blocks are declared. On the Commander itself, flanking has already cost the blocker a point of toughness, so the pump finishes the job and a fight the defender read as even collapses in your favor. The cost is the brake on that swing. Two white pips plus a generic per use is steep enough that activating it more than once or twice a turn pulls mana away from deploying fresh threats, forcing a real tension between growing one fight and widening the board. It is a tribal seed planted years before Wizards committed to Knights as a deliberate recurring theme: a creature that rewards fielding more of its own kind rather than functioning alone, and an early experiment in giving white's aggressive shells internal cohesion rather than a pile of unconnected bodies.