Gossamer Phantasm

The Illusion's bargain laid bare: a 2/1 flyer that costs less than its evasive body should, and pays for the discount by evaporating the instant anything points at it. The downside is total. A removal spell, a bounce effect, even a friendly pump aimed its way: all of them sacrifice it before they resolve, which means an opponent rarely bothers spending a card to kill it at all. They simply ping it with the cheapest targeted effect on hand, or tag it with a fight ability, and watch it remove itself. That is the elegant cruelty of the design: the creature defends against being killed by removal precisely by being too fragile to bother removing, and the body that gets through the air is real damage when left alone. This template, evasive beater married to a sacrifice-on-target clause, became the recurring Illusion blueprint, the same skeleton later worn by Phantasmal Bear and Phantasmal Image. It rewards the aggressor who clocks fast and the controller who never asks it to block a creature it cannot beat, and it punishes the player who treats it like a normal flyer worth protecting. The auras and combat tricks that make ordinary two-drops formidable are exactly the spells that send this one to the graveyard.