Mantis Engine

Pumpable abilities printed straight onto a body were an early instinct for solving a particular bind: how do you make a creature that demands removal without overstatting it? The answer here is two keyword grants on a colorless artifact frame, and the binary nature of those grants is what caps the mana sink. Flying and first strike are states, not counters: paying twice for the same keyword in a turn buys you nothing. So this is not a firebreathing-style sink that scales with whatever you can pour in; it is a 3/3 that spends exactly four mana to become evasive and first-striking once per turn, then has nothing further to do with mana. The real decision is which mode the board demands: flying to slip past a ground stall, first strike to win combat against another 3/3 by dealing its damage first, or both when the mana is available. The colorless cost is doing quiet work too, since the cast and both activations are color-agnostic; the creature slots into any deck willing to find five and then keep four open. What you get is a body that sits inert and converts to a clean threat on command, leaning on flexible activations rather than raw stats to earn its keep: plain at rest, but never a card without choices to make once the mana arrives.