Noxious Dragon

A flyer whose removal is priced into its death rather than its cast. The body lands as a four-mana-value-of-stats Dragon that flies and trades into the air, but the design intent shows in the death trigger: this is a creature you are meant to throw into combat or feed to the graveyard, because the destroy clause only fires when it dies. That timing is the whole strategic axis. A removal spell answers a threat on your terms; this answers one on the board's terms, after blocks, after a burn spell, after a chump. The mana-value-3-or-less ceiling keeps it honest by tying it to the low end of the curve: it cleanly takes a mana dork, a hatebear, a two-drop beater, a small combo piece, but cannot touch the four-and-up threats a top-end Dragon would otherwise be expected to dominate. So the card splits its job in two directions that rarely overlap. As an attacker it pressures the opponent's life total in the air; as a removal engine it wants to die. Building around it means accepting that its best line is often to stop being a creature, which is a strange thing to ask of a six-drop with evasion, and exactly what gives it more texture than a vanilla beater of the same size.