A-Dreamshackle Geist
The tell of this evasive tapper is that it does its work on offense, not defense. The trigger fires at the beginning of combat on your turn, which flips the usual logic of the flying-plus-tap creature: instead of holding up to lock down an attacker before your opponent swings, this Spirit taps a blocker out of the way for its own air raid, then swings for three unblocked. The two modes split along a tempo axis. The straight tap clears one turn's worth of runway; the "doesn't untap" mode is the more patient line, a soft answer that keeps a defender parked across two of your combats without ever spending a card to kill it. The "up to one" clause is what keeps the trigger from working against you: on a board where nothing needs answering, you decline the choice, attack in the air, and hold the effect for a turn that matters. Everything about the design pulls in one direction, toward a proactive threat that wants to be racing rather than stalling, with the tap effect existing to clear its own path. The Alchemy rebalance did not touch that timing (the paper original triggers on the same window); it nudged the body from a 3/1 up to a 3/2, giving the flier enough toughness to survive the incidental pings and one-power blocks that would otherwise trade with it mid-race.
