Aven Trooper

Built for a graveyard-matters era, where filling your own bin counted as forward progress rather than risk. Most pump-on-a-flier designs of its day asked only for mana, but this activation taxes a card from hand on top of the cost, converting what could have been a repeatable evasive beater into a sink for cards you wanted in the yard anyway. That hand-discard is the whole reason the card exists: feed it spells and creatures destined for threshold, flashback, or whatever recursion the deck was running, and the body grows a little as a byproduct. The toughness bump matters more than the power: each activation pushes the flier out of range of the small burn and X/1-killers of its day, so it keeps trading up while you empty your hand. Standalone, the rate is poor and the activation expensive, which is the design's whole logic; the card functions less as a beatdown engine than as a converter, turning dead cards into incremental board pressure for a deck whose plan was throwing things away. Detached from that context it does very little, and it has stayed exactly where it landed: a niche enabler bolted to one mechanic.