Balshan Collaborator

The pump activation is the entire reason to play this over a vanilla blue Bird, and its cost is the tell: a black-mana sink stapled onto an evasive blue body, designed to reward the decks willing to splash off-color. On its own it is a fair flying clock; with black mana available it scales, every leftover buying another point of size at instant speed. The repeatable boost matters more than its magnitude. Left mana open turns a stalled board into incremental reach: you trade up in combat, push the last points through over several turns, or threaten a bigger blocker than your opponent expects. This is small, deliberate color-pair plumbing from an era when sets nudged players toward a particular two-color pairing by handing one color an evasive threat whose ceiling lives in the other. Nothing here is loud, and nothing was meant to be; it fills the gap for an aggressive flyer that wants a black-mana outlet for its idle mana, and it does that job without pretending to be more.