Merfolk Seer

The card draw here is deliberately deferred and metered, and that is the whole design point. Where many self-replacing creatures hand you a card the instant they die, this one defers the payoff to a second, optional payment of after the body is already in the graveyard. The split changes the math: you commit the floor cost up front for a fair blocker, then decide, at the moment of death, whether drawing is worth more than the mana you would otherwise hold for a counterspell or a trick. The optionality keeps it from ever stranding you. If the mana is committed elsewhere, you decline and the Merfolk simply dies. This is the cantripping-creature idea in an early, throttled form, where the dies trigger is conditional on liquid mana rather than guaranteed on death. The Wizard trades a touch above a vanilla blocker in combat, because anything that kills it in a swing rewards you with a card if you can afford the toll. Its value is back-loaded to the part of the game where mana is plentiful, sized so the dividend never arrives free. The intent is modesty: a defensive blue creature that pays a small, taxed bonus rather than an engine, with the extra payment doing the work of pricing the draw out of the early turns when tempo matters most.