Befriending the Moths // Imperial Moth
The Saga template usually reads as a slow-burn payoff: three chapters of escalating value that culminate in something worth the wait. This one inverts the expectation by making the front chapters almost incidental. Chapters I and II hand a creature you control +1/+1 and evasion for the turn, a modest combat nudge you would not build around on its own. The real event is chapter III, which does not resolve an effect so much as convert the enchantment into a permanent flyer that stays. That transform clause reframes the two prior chapters as a pilot's fee for a body: you pay four mana, poke twice while the counters accrue, and end up with a durable flyer that no longer needs a target to matter. The friction is the wait itself; a card that spends two of your turns pushing incremental damage before it becomes the thing you actually wanted asks you to have a board worth buffing in the interim, or to accept the first two chapters as filler. It is a compact study in how the Saga frame can time-release a creature rather than build toward a spell: the lore counters are a countdown to a permanent, and everything before the flip is interest paid on a body that arrives on its own schedule rather than yours.
