Hoverguard Sweepers
Eight mana buys a Man-o'-War scaled to the top of the curve: a flying 5/6 whose arrival bounces up to two creatures instead of one. That arithmetic is the whole problem with the design. The tempo swing that makes a cheap bounce-on-a-body so satisfying inverts at the high end, because by the time you can deploy a double-Unsummon stapled to a fat flier, the tempo you regain rarely outpaces what you spent buying it. The "up to two" wording and the lack of a self-targeting restriction are what keep it from being a plain beater with a tacked-on bounce: the targets are creatures, but they can be your own, so the trigger can re-buy an enters-the-battlefield effect, reset one of your dorks for value, or be declined entirely when nothing profitable is on the table. The clock is real once it lands, and on the board it can answer two blockers or two threats in a single deployment. This is the high-end expression of an effect blue has always priced cheaply at the bottom of the curve, where a fragile body pays the balancing cost; here the eight-mana line absorbs that work instead. Note the timing ceiling: with no flash, you normally cast it on your own main phase, so it clears what is already on the battlefield rather than responding to anything. The bounce is a deployment bonus, not the reason to run it. The threat is.


