Brago, King Eternal
The flicker payoff that turns every enters-the-battlefield trigger you control into a per-combat tax on the table. The 2/4 flying body matters less than the engine bolted to it: connect once and you blink any number of your nonland permanents, re-firing every ETB and untapping anything that was tapped. The phrasing is what separates this from a fair midrange creature. Because the effect triggers on combat damage and uses the stack, you choose the blink targets when the ability goes on the stack: the opponent has already committed their attackers and blocks, so you are blinking into a known board. That stack placement also defines the engine's real vulnerability, the honest cost most builders learn the hard way: removal cast in response to the trigger resolves first, last-in-first-out, and kills the chosen permanent before it can be exiled and returned. The blink protects nothing on the way up. Note too that each returned creature comes back as a new object with summoning sickness, so the blink resets rather than refreshes anything that needed to attack or tap. White-blue had cheaper one-shot flicker (Cloudshift, Ghostly Flicker) long before this, but those answer a single problem once; this re-arms the same effect every turn it lands a hit, which is what made it the founding piece of an entire stax-flicker archetype. The body is the tax that pays for the engine: a 2/4 has to connect, forcing an investment in evasion, protection, and the value board the blink is feeding.







