Charging Griffin

Four mana for a 2/2 flier is a non-starter on its raw line, and the attack trigger is the whole concession to playability: the body swings as a 3/3 and sits back on defense as a 2/2, so the +1/+1 shows up only where a white curve actually wants it, in the air, on offense. The pump lasts until end of turn rather than resetting per combat, which means it genuinely stacks if the Griffin attacks more than once in a turn or the trigger gets copied. What keeps the card from snowballing is not the wording of the bonus but the rarity of those cases: in an ordinary game it connects once and asks for nothing else. The buff exists to make one swing land for an extra point, not to build a finisher, and there is a small quirk in the timing worth noting: because the boost persists through the turn, a Griffin that has already declared its attack is a 3/3 until end of turn and will shrug off two damage in that window, even though it dies to the same ping the moment it is a blocker or the turn passes. The Griffin has long been white's color-pie answer to flying pressure, and this is the variant that grows on attack rather than loading up on keywords. Plain by intent, it fills the slot where a white deck wants evasion and tempo more than a payoff, and it teaches the attack-trigger conditional cleanly: power that exists only while the creature is doing its one job.