Patagia Golem

A colorless body with a built-in evasion switch, sold at the price every set's artifact section was built around: a creature any deck could run, with an ability any deck could pay for. The whole design rests on a repeatable activation that costs more than it looks. The flying is not free and not permanent, so the card never threatens to dominate a board; it asks you to spend three mana each turn you want the 2/3 to connect, which is steep enough that the evasion stays a closing tool rather than a default. The small body and the expensive switch hold each other in check: the rate works precisely because every flight has to compete with whatever else the mana could buy that turn. The Golem creature type was still mostly a flavor designation here, decades before tribal payoffs gave it mechanical weight, so this is a Golem in name and an artifact-creature beater in function. The design instinct on display is that an artifact creature should be a self-contained package: a fair body, an optional upside, no setup. That template (a cheap-ish colorless threat with a mana-gated ability that turns it from grounded to airborne) recurs across artifact sets for years afterward, usually with a sharper rate, but the shape starts with utilitarian commons like this one.