Dour Port-Mage
"Leave the battlefield without dying" is the clause that defines this card, and the exclusion buried in it is the whole design decision: not death, not damage, but any exit that skips the graveyard. Blink a creature and you draw. Bounce it and you draw. Sacrifice it and you get nothing, which is exactly the point. That single word "dying" carves the sacrifice-and-aristocrats axis out of the equation entirely, so this Wizard can't be jammed into every value shell chasing death triggers; it wants a specific texture of deck, one built around flicker and self-bounce rather than fodder. The second ability closes the loop by returning your own creatures to hand, normally a tempo cost and here converted into a repeatable card off the same enter-the-battlefield permanents you were already running. Point the tap ability at anything that wants to re-enter, and you have a two-mana engine that refills your hand every turn from interactions most decks treat as one-shots. A 1/3 that never means to attack is exactly the frame the design wants: a value piece sitting behind the board, not a clock. The activation cost keeps it from spinning infinitely early, but across a long game the port-mage turns blinks and bounces into a slow, grinding stream of cards.



