Arrogant Poet

A 2/1 body for two mana is a modest rate on the ground, but the design here is really about turning a life total into an evasion budget. The attack trigger prices flying at two life each swing, so this is a creature that gets to decide, combat by combat, whether the game state can afford to fly over a blocker or whether the damage is better spent staying grounded. That optionality is the whole point: it dodges the tension between a card that always flies (too much for the cost) and one that never does (a vanilla body). Paying life to enable attacks is a black staple going back to designs like Vampire Nighthawk's cousins and the sacrifice-your-life-total school of aggression, but this one keeps the payment tied to a single swing rather than a permanent buff, which means the cost scales with how long the game runs. In a deck built to spend life as a resource (the aristocrat and life-payment shells black has always favored), that recurring two-life tap is fuel rather than a liability. Left alone it is a fragile threat that empties its tank fast; leveraged correctly it is a repeatable evasive attacker whose only limit is how much life you are willing to burn to get in.