A-Syndicate Infiltrator

The condition here is doing something quietly unusual: not graveyard size, not raw card count, but the spread of costs among the cards you have discarded and lost. A yard holding a one, a two, a three, a four, and a five flips a 3/3 flyer into a 5/5; a pile of five identical one-drops leaves it untouched. That is a deckbuilding tax paid in variety rather than in speed, which puts a tempo shell in an odd spot: the kind of blue-black board that would rather flood with cheap Vampires has no reason to stretch its curve to feed the buff. The ward is the real spine of the design, buying the flyer a protective window that outlasts the size bonus and makes it awkward to trade into at parity. When the graveyard cooperates, what you get is an evasive body that grows with no board investment at all: no counters, no sacrifice, no attack trigger, just a passive reward for having played across a range of costs over the game. The tension is whether an aggressive shell can afford the higher end of the curve the bonus wants, or whether it settles for a warded flyer that occasionally spikes. Most builds accept the latter and treat the +2/+2 as a windfall rather than a plan.