Feral Shadow

A French-vanilla three-mana 2/1 flier exists for one reason: it is the rate sheet entry against which a designer measures every evader with text. Black's flying creatures are usually paying for their wings with a fragile body, and this is the unadorned baseline of that trade, the Nightstalker with nothing but its wings. It belongs to a tribe Mirage assembled almost entirely as gridwork (creatures defined by their place in the curve rather than any single trick), and within that gridwork this is the plain evasive two-power threat that the more interesting cards riff on. The 2/1 frame is the whole story: just enough power to matter in the air, exactly fragile enough that a single point of reach or a stray ping erases it. There is no upside hiding in the text box and no downside lurking either, which is precisely what makes it useful as a yardstick. When you want to know what a black flier with an ability is actually charging you for that ability, you subtract this card from it.