Fledgling Imp

Spending a black mana and a card from hand to grant flying for one turn is a trade that only computes when the discard itself is doing work, and the design assumes a graveyard-driven context to make that math land. In a block where flashback turned the bin into a second hand and threshold rewarded a stocked yard, pitching a card to push two damage past blockers stopped being pure cost and became setup: you might be discarding a Roar of the Wurm you intend to cast from the graveyard anyway, a creature whose value lives there, or simple fuel toward threshold. The body is deliberately plain so all the variance lives in what you throw away. As a piece of recurring black design, this is the repeatable evasion enabler that asks you to spend resources you were already happy to spend, a line black has worked through other discard-as-engine creatures like Skirge Familiar. Strip away the graveyard payoff and the cost is real on both ends: the mana and the card are both gone, the flying lasts one turn, and the 2/2 is just a 2/2 with a button you have no reason to press. Its floor and ceiling are set entirely by the deck around it, which makes it less a card than a switch waiting for the right circuit.