Flowstone Shambler

The Flowstone creatures of the Tempest block all share one mechanic: a repeatable pump that trades toughness for power, and they exist to demonstrate how much the cost of that trade matters. Here the math is brutal because the body is so small. Each red mana adds a point of power and drains a point of toughness, so on a 2/2 the first activation makes a 3/1 and the second kills it. That ceiling is the whole design: the creature can only push to 3/1 before the toughness reduction is lethal to itself, which makes the ability less a damage engine than a one-time combat boost the creature pays for out of its own life. The drawback is permanent for the turn and applies only to itself, so the activation does not reach across combat to shrink a blocker or finish an attacker; the entire risk is internal. That self-cannibalizing ceiling is the point of comparison with the rarer Flowstone bodies of the same era, which carried enough toughness to actually profit from the trade. This one was built to show the floor of the mechanic: a symmetric cost, a fragile frame, and an activation that spirals down rather than up. It reads as a clean teaching example of sacrifice-to-pump pricing, where the drawback is never more than one click away from mattering, and the second click is always fatal.