Cephalid Constable

The threat scales with combat, not with mana. Most bounce in blue is a fixed transaction: pay the cost, return one permanent, done. This 1/1 turns that one-time exchange into a snowball tied entirely to how much damage connects. One swing for one returns a single permanent; the moment you pump it, give it evasion, or double the strike, the same body picks up the opponent's entire board a turn at a time, lands and creatures piling back into their hand faster than they can replay them. The fragility of the body is the price: a 1/1 dies to almost anything, so the card only works as the payoff of a setup (an unblockable enabler, a sword, a way to make it hit hard) rather than as a standalone clock. That gap between a trivial stat line and a board-emptying ceiling is the kind of engine that demands you build a deck around connecting with it, which has kept it a niche combo and tempo piece rather than a fair beater. The design lesson is in the scaling clause itself: "up to that many" converts combat damage directly into tempo, so every point of power you add to it is also a permanent you strip away. Few creatures make the player's own evasion engine the throttle on a hard-control effect quite so literally.