Doc Ock's Henchmen

Flash and connive make a strange but deliberate pairing: one keyword rewards you for holding the card back, the other rewards you for sending it forward. The instant-speed cast means this can ambush an attacker or hold up as a bluff, arriving as a 2/1 whenever the timing suits. But the connive trigger only fires on attack, which means the growth engine sits idle until the creature commits to the red zone and starts trading a card each swing for card selection and, if you pitch a nonland, a +1/+1 counter that inches the body toward relevance. That tension is the design: a fragile 2/1 that costs three mana wants a reason to attack into a board that can easily kill it, and connive supplies both the smoothing (dig toward your gas, ditch your excess lands) and the incentive (grow past the first blocker). The flash is what keeps it from being purely a mediocre beater; it lets a tempo deck slot the effect where it hurts, then convert defense into offense once the coast is clear. It is a filtering creature dressed as an attacker, or an attacker dressed as a filtering creature, depending on which half of the turn you value more.