Mulldrifter

The card that taught a generation what "value" means. Evoke is the load-bearing mechanic here: the same card that wants to be a flying body asking five mana also wants to be a three-mana Divination that leaves a corpse behind, and the choice between those two modes is the entire decision. Cast it at full price and you keep a clock; take the cheaper route and you trade the body for tempo and a card in the graveyard, which is exactly where the rest of an engine wants it. That second mode is why the design has aged into a workhorse: it sacrifices itself on the way in, which is to say it volunteers for every blink, every reanimation target, every recursion loop that wants a creature happy to die. The two-cards-on-entry trigger doesn't care how the creature got there or how it leaves, so the card pulls double duty as both the payoff and the fuel. Evoke as a mechanic has been revisited many times since, but this is the cleanest statement of the idea: a creature priced two ways, where the cheaper way is a deliberate self-sacrifice that pays you in cards. Few commons have generated more imitators, and none of the imitators retired the original.