Brass Gnat

An evader with a tax on its own attacks. The clause that keeps it from untapping during your untap step turns this 1/1 flier from a free clock into a recurring auction: each turn you decide whether the chip damage is worth a mana, and that mana competes with everything else you want to do on the same turn. This is the slow-suspend school of design that ran through this era, where small permanents carried delayed or metered costs rather than splashy ones, and the upkeep payment is a deliberately understated version of that idea. The body is incidental; the interesting object is the recurring decision the untap clause forces. Against a clogged board the gnat is nearly free, since you would not be tapping out anyway; in a tight game it punishes you for wanting to apply pressure and develop at once. The artifact type matters more than the insect tribe: it dodges color-based removal and slots into colorless shells that want a cheap evasive threat without committing to a creature color. The temperament on display has mostly fallen out of fashion: a creature that does its job only as fast as you are willing to keep feeding it, trading raw efficiency for a per-turn cost you can never fully pay off and forget.