Gust Walker

A 2/2 body with a switch baked into the attack step: swing plainly and it stays a ground-bound two-drop, or exert it as it attacks and it climbs to a 3/3 that flies over a stalled board for the turn, at the cost of missing your next untap. The elegance is in where the reward lands. There is no mana to hold up, no separate activation to sequence, no counter to bank; the whole decision folds into an attack you were already declaring. The only currency is a turn of defense, and you pay it exactly when evasion earns its keep and not before. That is what exert is doing structurally on a small creature: it puts a ceiling above the card without lifting its cost or raising its floor, and it moves the burden of evaluation off the card and onto the player each combat. Turn two, it reads like curve filler. Later, it becomes the reason an aggressive board does not stall out against a defensive one, offering a flier precisely on the turns the ground has clogged and asking nothing on the turns it hasn't. The floor is dull by design; the ceiling is there for the games that hand you a reason to reach for it.