Ghost-Lit Nourisher

This Spirit pays for its fragile 2/1 frame by offering two routes to the same job. Left on the board, it is a repeatable pump-on-a-stick: every turn it survives, the tap ability throws +2/+2 onto a single attacker or blocker, the kind of slow combat advantage that grinds out a ground stall. The trouble is that a 2/1 with a splashy tap ability invites removal before it ever activates, and a creature that dies before doing its job leaves you with nothing. Channel was the cycle-wide hedge against exactly that failure: by stapling an alternative cost that fires from your hand, the card refuses to be a dead draw even when the body never reaches the battlefield. The discarded mode pumps +4/+4 instead of +2/+2, the larger burst precisely because you have surrendered the engine to get it: a one-shot instant-speed combat trick that ambushes a blocker or pushes lethal, paid for by forfeiting every future activation. Whether you cast it as a creature and rent the +2/+2 turn after turn, or throw it away for a single bigger swing, the card insists on being relevant either way. That is the design idea Channel was built to deliver across its whole cycle: removing the feel-bad of a creature killed before it earned its keep.