Paragon of Gathering Mists

One of a run of mono-color anthem lords cut to the same template, each tuned to its color's identity, and blue's is the only one whose secondary ability rewrites combat math instead of reinforcing it. The +1/+1 to other blue creatures is the price of admission, the standard lord tax paid up front. The flying grant is where blue's color pie takes over: it converts grounded bodies into evasive threats one at a time, at instant speed, so a wide blue board can force damage through a ground stall exactly the turn it needs to and keep the rest of the team home to block. The constraint sits in the fine print: the ability touches one creature per activation and costs blue plus the tap, so it scales with how many of these you can untap rather than with how big the board grows. The 2/2 body buffs its teammates and never itself, which keeps it a support piece rather than a threat that also happens to anthem. As tribal blue-weenie design it lands in an awkward spot, since blue has rarely had the aggressive small-creature shells that a lord like this wants, so the card has always read as a tool hunting for a tribe rather than the cornerstone of one. Without the evasion clause it would be a purely academic anthem; that clause is the reason it ever shows up at all.