Chea, Friend to Maybe Too Many

"Familiar" spent years as pure creative-team decoration: a scattering of Bats, Foxes, Frogs, and Faeries across a dozen sets that were never designed to share a payoff. This card retroactively invents that payoff by declaring, in its reminder text, exactly which creature types count, and then rewarding you twice for stacking them. The flash grant is the sneakier of the two abilities: turning your Cats and Spiders into instant-speed plays folds an entire deck's worth of small creatures onto the opponent's turn, letting you hold up interaction and still develop the board when they blink. The tap ability is the drain engine, scaling green ramp and opponent life-loss in lockstep with your familiar count, so every additional Bird does double duty as mana and as a clock. The 2/4 body is deliberately modest; the card is a lord in effect without being a lord in stats, since it does not buff the familiars so much as change when and how they generate value. What makes the design worth noting is the archival move: it takes a word that carried no rules meaning for years and assigns it one after the fact, gathering creatures printed with no idea they belonged together into a single tribe. The name winks at the flavor, but the real cleverness is the mechanical proposition: a tribe assembled retroactively from scraps.