Echo Inspector

Connive is the mechanic that lets an evasive body pay its own way, and this is close to its plainest expression: four mana buys a flier that filters your top card on entry and may walk away a little bigger for it. The trigger draws, then discards, so the net card count stays flat: this is selection, not advantage, a loot that smooths your hand rather than growing it. The conditional counter is where the small optimization lives. You earn the single +1/+1 only if the card you pitch is a nonland, which turns the discard step into a choice: flooding on lands actively works against the growth clause, since shipping an extra Island denies the counter. The body is at its best when you have a genuine surplus of spells and can afford to trade one for the upgrade rather than dumping mana rocks you never wanted. A 2/3 with flying holds the ground while it chips in over the top, and the connive on entry is the whole event; once it resolves you are left with a flier that is exactly one point larger than baseline, if the discard cooperated. The Rogue and Bird lines give it tribal footholds, but what recommends it is the loot-into-evasion package, not the creature types. Workmanlike blue card selection stapled to a flier: nothing that bends a format, just a clean tempo-and-filtering piece for decks that want to see more of their good cards without ceding the air.