Loyal Drake

The Lieutenant ability word was built to reward the singleton nobody in the format can ignore: your commander. This is the blue payoff of that cycle, and its logic is quietly precise. Blue does not want a body; it wants cards. So the reward for keeping your general on the battlefield is a card drawn at the beginning of every combat step on your turn, contingent on the commander surviving to that point. Note the timing: the trigger fires before attackers are declared and asks nothing of you but that your commander be present, so the Drake can draw and then hold back, or draw and swing, entirely at your discretion. The 2/2 flyer is almost incidental; the evasion matters mostly so the body can chip in and slip past ground blockers when it does attack. The tension is that the whole engine hangs on a permanent every opponent is already trying to kill or bounce, which makes the card a barometer for how well you are protecting your commander. When the general is safe, this is one of the cleaner mana-free draw effects in a color that hoards them; when the commander is stuck in the command zone, the intervening-if check fails and the Drake reverts to a plain flyer, waiting for its condition to come back online. That conditionality is the price the design pays for card advantage that costs nothing once the board is set, and the commitment it demands is exactly the commander-centric stance the ability word was written to encourage.