Owl Familiar

A flying 1/1 that pays for its body by looting on the way in, which is the trick that makes two mana for a Bird worth a slot: you are not really buying the creature, you are buying a loot effect with an evasive body stapled on. The discard-after-draw is the structural cost that keeps it honest. Pure card draw on a cheap flier would be a different conversation; looting trades one card for one card, smoothing your hand and feeding a graveyard rather than growing your resources. That makes the body close to free, but only ever a wash on cards. The Portal sets wrote their effects in the gentlest possible terms, all upside and no fine print, which is why the loot here reads as a simple gift rather than the tempo-neutral filter it actually is. The template it established (a flier whose enters-the-battlefield trigger filters your hand) has been reprinted and remixed many times since under names players know better. The flying matters more than it looks: an evasive 1/1 chips in or trades up in the air long after the loot has already done its job, so the card keeps a residual use rather than becoming a dead draw. It is the platonic example of an effect printed as a creature so that it can be blinked, bounced, recurred, and reanimated, each of which turns a one-time loot into a repeatable engine.