High-Rise Sawjack

Reach on a green three-drop is a defensive tax by default: it lets a ground creature hold the line against fliers without asking the pilot to spend mana or a spell. The wrinkle here is that the block does not merely absorb, it retaliates. The +2/+0 turns a 2/3 wall into a 4/3 the moment it steps in front of something with flying, which quietly rewrites the math for the attacking player. A flier that would have traded up into a small blocker, or slipped past it, now has to survive a swing back, so many aerial attacks that would ordinarily be free stop being profitable. The bonus fires only on the block, not on the swing, which keeps the card reactive rather than evasive: the pump is conditional on the opponent committing to the air, and it lasts only through the turn. That framing makes it a punisher for flying-heavy strategies specifically, the kind of ground creature that makes a squadron of small evasive attackers reconsider whether the skies are actually open. Reach paired with a combat trigger that scales the body upward is a tidy bit of design logic: it rewards the defender for doing the thing reach already invites, closing the gap between "can block" and "wants to block."