Conquering Manticore
Threaten stapled to a body, and the math changes the moment you read it that way. A bare steal-a-creature spell is a tempo gambit: you borrow the blocker, swing, and hope the two-for-one of handing it back doesn't catch up with you. Bundling the effect onto a 5/5 flier shifts where the value lives, because the borrowed attacker no longer has to be the whole play. The Manticore itself has summoning sickness the turn it lands, so it doesn't join the assault immediately; what it does is untap their best creature, hand it haste, and send that loaned threat in while leaving you a 5/5 evasive clock for next turn. If the stolen creature dies in combat (chumped, traded, or walked into a removal spell), you have turned their threat into a sacrifice and kept the flier. The control-until-end-of-turn clause that usually reads as the drawback on a temporary-steal card here points toward removal: you want the loaned creature gone before it reverts. The evasion is what makes the package cohere, since the body that stays behind dodges the same ground board it just borrowed from. Six mana for a 5/5 flier plus a one-shot Act of Treason is an honest rate rather than a pushed one, which is exactly why this reads as a tempo-leaning finisher instead of a combo piece: it asks you to convert the borrowed turn into damage or a dead blocker, not to chain it into anything.
