Battlefield Percher

The restriction is the whole point: a flyer barred from grounded combat is a creature built for the air war and nothing else. That trade is deliberate. Black rarely gets clean evasion, and the way Wizards paid for the flying here was to wall it off from any ground defense, so the body that menaces you overhead does nothing the moment a real threat marches up the dirt. The pump ability is the second half of the design: an open-ended mana sink that lets the bird climb out of range of opposing flyers or punch through as a finisher once the skies have stalled. That combination, evasion plus a repeatable boost, makes it a slow clock that rewards a flooding hand rather than a tempo play, which is a curious thing to hang on a five-mana frame. The card belongs to a small black tradition of flyers built to dominate the air rather than guard the ground; the blocking clause is the lever that pays for the rest, and the activated ability is the reason the body costs what it does. It is not asking to be a centerpiece. It is asking to be the one creature that wins a contested sky and keeps winning it as long as the mana holds.