Flight of Equenauts

The printed eight in the top-left corner is a fiction, and convoke is what makes it one. Alone on an empty board you would pay all of it, and almost nobody ever does; the real price is a fistful of untapped bodies, each one you tap covering one generic mana, with a white creature able to answer the pip directly. That gap between the number and the actual cost is the whole design: a horizontal deck that has run its ground attacks into a stalemate still has a battlefield to convert, and here it converts width into a 4/5 flier that lands well before any honest eight-drop could. The size fits the game state it grew out of. A stalled ground, an opponent stabilized behind blockers, and a hand that needs to go over the top: 4/5 shrugs off most of the burn and small removal that would otherwise punish tapping out, and the flying steps clean over the very board clog that fed the convoke discount. The tension worth naming is the cost paid in creatures rather than lands. Every body you tap to cast this is a body that will not be attacking or blocking that turn, so the spell asks you to spend your board to buy your finisher instead of swinging with it. A top-end payoff for the deck that has bodies to spare, priced in exactly the resource such a deck floods.