Loyal Apprentice

Lieutenant is the mechanic that answers a specific problem in multiplayer red: the two-drop that runs out of gas the moment it eats a removal spell. This one solves it by refusing to spend itself on a single body. As long as the commander is on the board, the start of each of your own combats manufactures another flier, and the tokens arrive already able to attack, so the card converts a static presence into a recurring clock rather than a one-time threat. The design tension is worth naming: a small two-mana body dies to almost anything, but the value has already been banked, and the printing on the token (colorless Thopter, artifact, flying) quietly feeds the machine-oriented builds that want artifact bodies for their own sake. The whole engine is gated behind the commander requirement, which is the real ceiling on its power: strip the general off the field and the apprentice reverts to a fragile early beater with nothing to say. That conditional is what holds a repeatable token-generator at two mana instead of pricing it alongside the flying-army enablers that ask four or five. It is a role-player built for a very particular board configuration, and it does that job without pretending to be anything larger.