Arbiter of the Ideal
Inspired asked a strange question for a blue payoff: what do you do with a creature that wants to attack and then get untapped? Most of the mechanic's cards rewarded the swing itself, but this Sphinx routes the reward through an untap trigger that fires whenever the body comes back online, which means the attack is only half the engine. The other half is whatever cheats it untapped at the right moment, since the reveal-and-cheat-into-play effect cares nothing about how the untap happens. The payoff is unusually greedy for the cost: a free artifact, creature, or land off the top, dropped onto the battlefield rather than into hand, with the manifestation counter quietly making it an enchantment for the bestow-and-constellation crowd of its era. That last clause is mostly flavor on a typical hit, but it is the kind of rider that turns a fair tempo card into a combo piece in the right shell. The friction is that the trigger is blind: you see the top card only as it flips, so the engine is built on library manipulation if you want to control the yield. Left to chance, it is a 4/5 flier that occasionally vomits a permanent into play for free, and the tension between that random upside and the cost of forcing repeated untaps is the whole reason it never settled into a single home.
