Ironheart, Clever Champion

The line that reframes everything is the third one: improvise stops being a discount attached to a single spell and becomes a standing property of your whole noncreature suite. Counterspells, card draw, removal, whatever you cast, each can be paid in tapped metal instead of mana, and the reach of that scales directly with how wide your artifact base runs. That is the interesting resource-conversion axis: your battlefield doubles as a reservoir of generic cost that refreshes every untap step, which quietly changes what artifact tokens are worth. A Servo or Thopter is no longer just a body or a chump blocker; it is a stored for the next spell on the stack. The tension the card lives in is genuine. Every artifact you tap to improvise is an artifact you have committed to the stack rather than combat, and one that cannot be tapped again for a mana ability or an activated ability that requires tapping until it untaps. So the discount competes with the board those same permanents are meant to build, and the card asks how much of your battlefield you want spent casting spells versus holding the ground. The 3/4 flyer keeps it relevant while the artifacts sit ready, and its own improvise means an artifact-heavy shell can help pay for the champion that turns the shell into an engine.