Invasion of Kamigawa // Rooftop Saboteurs

Every battle design has to answer the same worry: you pay for a permanent that starts life defeatable, and the flip only pays you if you can finish it off. This one hedges the bet by front-loading a tempo swing that lands the instant it arrives. Tapping an artifact or creature and pinning it under a stun counter buys a full turn cycle of disruption, so even if the siege sits uncompleted, the four mana already did concrete work. That is the trait separating battles that read well from battles that read like dead weight: they pay you on arrival, not only on completion. The back half rewards you for pushing damage through. An evasive body that refills your hand on connect is already a fine payoff, but the clause worth dwelling on is that its combat damage to a battle counts too. The flipped creature can point at other sieges, feeding the same completion engine it just came out of, so a board with more than one battle turns Rooftop Saboteurs into a self-sustaining flip loop rather than a one-and-done attacker. The result is a clean two-act structure: lockdown on the way in, a card-drawing flier on the way out. The tension is built into the frame: the opponent you pick to protect the siege can defend it, so completing the battle is never free, and the entry-tap stun is your way of buying the tempo to see the flip through.