Dralnu's Pet

The kicker turns a forgettable 2/2 into a referendum on the worst card in your hand: how much are you willing to pay, in mana and in a discarded creature, to scale this thing up. The interesting part is that the counters track the discarded card's mana value rather than handing out a flat bonus. Pitch a six-drop you were never going to hard-cast and the body arrives as a flying 8/8; pitch a one-drop and you have burned a card for almost nothing. That sliding return is the design's whole point, and it is a rarer role than a plain pump spell: a bridge between a hand clogged with expensive creatures and an actual board presence. The split color identity reinforces it. The base spell stays mono-blue and reliably castable, while the payoff lives behind an additional cost paid in black mana and a creature card discarded as you cast it, so you only reach the upside if your deck is built to support that splash and to stockpile high-cost fatties it could not otherwise deploy. Treating dead draws as ammunition rather than liabilities is a strangely modern proposition for a creature this old, and it predates the era when discard-as-resource designs became commonplace.