Grapeshot Catapult

Anti-flier tech in its rawest, most literal form: a tap-to-ping that only points upward. The design dates to a stretch of early Magic when ground decks had no clean structural answer to the air. Reach would not be templated as a keyword until much later; in the meantime, grounded archetypes needed dedicated hosers, and the artifact slot was where colorless decks went shopping for them. The rate is the part that holds it together: a 2/3 body that survives most early ground combat, attached to a repeatable ping that costs nothing but a tap, all for four mana any deck can pay. The restriction (creatures only, fliers only) is what keeps that rate from being absurd; widen the target clause and you have printed a much stronger card by accident. The structural idea (tax the air with a tap ability stapled to a defensive body) recurs in cleaner forms across the years since, every time a designer needs to give a grounded deck a way to answer the sky without bending a color pie. The catapult is the early, blunt prototype: a single-purpose answer that does exactly one thing and announces it in the name.