Dragon Hatchling
A 0/1 flier whose entire game plan is poured into a single firebreathing line: it enters as a body that cannot trade and asks you to feed it mana to matter. This is the cheap-dragon mana sink in miniature, a design red has reprinted across decades under different names, the creature that converts a flooded board into reach. The price of that flexibility is its starting power: zero. Untouched, it does nothing in combat, which means every point of damage it deals comes straight out of your mana pool the turn you swing, and an opponent holding removal can punish you the moment you tap low to make an attack lethal. The flying is what justifies the investment, turning each red mana spent into evasive pressure that only fliers and reach can answer rather than ground damage that gets chumped away. It is the training-wheels version of an archetype that scales up to creatures like Shivan Dragon: same firebreathing math, smaller floor, lower ceiling, built to teach how a mana sink turns late-game flood into a clock.





