Zhao, the Moon Slayer
A menacing 2/2 for is the delivery mechanism, but the payload is a two-stage attack on nonbasic mana. The first stage sits on the body from turn two: nonbasic lands enter tapped, a symmetrical tax that slows every fetch, dual, and utility land at the table by exactly one tempo, yours included. The second stage is the conqueror counter, walled off behind a seven-mana activation. When it finally lands, every nonbasic on the battlefield becomes a Mountain, and the design point worth dwelling on is the breadth of what that erases: not just extra land types but every ability the land carried. Creature-lands stop attacking, fixing duals stop fixing, anything doing more than tapping for mana is flattened to a bare red source, opponents and controller alike. This is board-wide land hosing wearing a creature's clothes, and the total symmetry is the whole constraint: the effect only benefits a deck built to shrug off its own Mountain-conversion, which means a manabase leaning hard on basics while the greedy nonbasic engines across the table collapse. Menace keeps the little body pressing life totals through the long setup, so the card has a job to do while you save toward the seven-mana payoff instead of sitting inert until then.


