Duct Crawler

A repeatable evasion engine on a one-drop body, built around an early-era instinct to make small red creatures buy their own way into combat. The activated cost is doing the real balancing work: stripping a blocker is neither free nor once-only, so the card asks for a steady drip of mana to keep punching through, which means it scales with the late game rather than the early board. That trade (a fragile 1/1 that becomes a damage faucet once the mana piles up) inverts how most aggressive one-drops were costed, where the body does the work and the ability is incidental. Here the body is incidental and the activation is the point. The constraint that keeps it honest is that each activation clears exactly one blocker: against a developed board this is single-target pressure, not a true unblockable button, and that ceiling is what stops a one-mana creature from running away with combat math. The flavor lands the mechanic cleanly: an insect small enough to slip through ductwork, choosing which guard to creep past. It belongs to a line of cheap creatures whose evasion is rented by the turn rather than printed as a keyword, a costing philosophy that traded board impact for flexibility long before evasion got handed out for free.