Coveted Peacock
Goad is a mechanic built for free-for-all politics, and this is one of the cleaner attempts to weld it onto an evasive body that gets to use it every turn. The flying is doing quiet structural work: the goad fires on the attack declaration, not on connecting, so even an opponent who chump-blocks the Bird out of the air still has a creature conscripted into someone else's combat next turn. A grounded attacker can get gummed up and never declared, which would leave the lever idle; the wings keep it swinging. The strategic axis here is not the damage; it is the redirection. Each attack forces a creature an opponent controls to swing the following turn, and to swing at someone other than you. In a multiplayer table that turns a single attacker into a steering wheel, drafting the table's best blocker into a neighbor's army turn after turn while you sit behind it. The 3/4 statline is the load-bearing part: tough enough to be declared into open boards without trading down, small enough that it was never meant to win on damage alone. This is a control lever dressed as a beater, a card whose job is to make other players' creatures into your political instruments rather than to close the game itself.


