Belbe's Percher

The defensive restriction here is the whole design lever. A flier confined to blocking only other fliers patrols the air and trades up against evasive threats, but it stands by while the creatures most decks plan to win with march underneath it. That concession buys a body slightly above the era's curve for what a flier of its size cost, so the card reads as a beater right up until the opponent simply attacks under it. Its flavor keys to Belbe, the flesh-forged emissary at the center of this era's storyline, and a half-living watcher of the skies maps cleanly onto a creature that minds the air and ignores the ground. The real tension is that the restriction never touches offense: on the attack it is a clean evasive 2/2, and the can-only-block clause costs you nothing until you try to defend with it. So the card quietly tilts its pilot toward the beatdown plan, since standing still is exactly where the drawback lives. This is deliberate asymmetry, a creature competent at one half of combat and useless at the other, an early statement of the flying-with-a-catch idea that later designs would dress up and complicate. Here it is laid out plainly: the sky is yours, the ground is not your problem until it is.