Gryff Rider

Training turns an aggressive board into a self-assembling machine, and this evasive two-power body is one of its cleaner expressions: it wants to swing behind something bigger and grow into a real threat over successive attacks. The reward comes from combat, not from a payment, so the counter is baked into the exact game action an aggressive deck is already trying to take. What keeps it from spiraling is the trigger condition: it needs a partner with strictly greater power in the same attack, so alone, or leading the charge, it stays a 2/1 flier and does nothing extra. That dependency is the whole tension of the card. It is a follow-up rather than a curve-topper, a two-drop's payoff that arrives on turn three or later, and it rewards a battlefield already built to attack rather than one starting from scratch. The flying matters beyond raw evasion: the counters stack onto a creature that connects reliably, so each successful attack compounds the last, turning a fragile flier into a clock a defender cannot easily race. It is workmanlike aggro glue, the kind of common that holds a curve together without ever being the reason you win.