Bog Imp

Evasion was once a premium worth paying for, and this 1/1 flier for two mana is the receipt. The willingness to staple flying onto a body with no other text, at a rate that does nothing but push one point of damage through the air, tells you what an unblocked creature was thought to be worth before the design vocabulary expanded. The black flier as a recurring slot has always been a flavor anchor (the imp, the bat, the gargoyle), but the mechanical job is the same now as it was then: pressure a board that has committed to the ground, and chip in a point at a time while heavier threats close the game. What dates this card is not the rate so much as the absence of any reason to choose it over the dozens of small fliers printed since with a keyword or a triggered ability bolted on. It is a clean baseline, flying with nothing else attached, which is precisely why later designs read as upgrades. There is no constraint doing balancing work here because there is nothing to balance: the card is the floor that every incremental black evasion creature has been built a step above.