Leaping Lizard

A pump ability turned inside out: instead of paying mana to get bigger, you pay to shrink the body by a point of toughness in exchange for evasion that lasts only through the turn. The trade is the whole design. Each activation makes the 2/3 slightly easier to kill while opening a flying lane, so repeated use turns a sturdy ground blocker into a fragile aerial threat, and the toughness drain is the price you pay each turn you want it in the air. Most green evasion of this era was permanent (trample on a big body, or a one-shot pump from something like Giant Growth); the self-decay clause here is a rare attempt to price flying as a rented, depreciating resource rather than a fixed keyword. So the card wants to attack into open skies on a single turn rather than camp the air indefinitely, since reaching the sky costs it a point of survivability. It is a modest, mechanically curious common from an early set whose design experiments are more often remembered for the ones that misfired, the kind of card whose ability reads cleaner on paper than it ever played at the table.