Ashcoat Bear

The whole pitch is timing, because there is nothing else here: a 2/2 with no rider, no enters-the-battlefield trigger, no evasion, just the bear and the keyword. Green almost never gets to interact during an opponent's turn, so an instant-speed body becomes a stand-in for the combat interaction the color is otherwise denied. Hold up the two mana, leave it untapped, and the creature can arrive mid-combat to wreck an attack or punish a block that assumed an empty board, and it dodges sorcery-speed sweepers that would catch a creature deployed on the main phase. That ambush logic traces back to the earliest sets, where deploying a body reactively functioned as pseudo-removal; the lineage is old, and this is the version with the keyword printed plainly rather than smuggled in as a rules wrinkle. What the extra investment buys is information and reach, not stats: you are paying to choose the moment, not to win the fight on power. Later green flash creatures hung abilities off this shape, which is exactly what makes the bare version useful as a reference point. Strip away every rider and you can measure what flash alone does to a creature's strategic axis, with no enters-the-battlefield value muddying the read. The control sample for a whole template.