Carrion Ants

The body is whatever your mana pool can pay for, and nothing more until you spend. The base 0/1 is both the punchline and the discipline: a creature that sits inert on the battlefield, contributing nothing in combat until the turn you decide to feed it. Each point of growth evaporates at end of turn, so there is no banking the size; the threat renews every turn but always reverts to a harmless zero-power blocker once the pumping stops. That is the strategic axis: not a permanent investment but a recurring bluff, where the real stat line is your untapped lands. An opponent who attacks or trades into it has to respect a body whose power can balloon mid-combat and collapse back to nothing by the end step.

When the vocabulary for "creature that grows as a function of available mana" was still being written, this stood as one of the black-coded sketches of it: entry stats traded away for an activation cheap enough that the scaling genuinely matters. Later designs iterated on the pattern with trample, evasion, or counters that stuck, all of which this card lacks. What remains is the bare shape of the mana-sink attacker: dormant by default, dangerous only on the turn you pump it, with no reach to push damage through and no way to keep what you paid for. The form is now familiar; this was an early attempt to draw it.