Phyrexian Battleflies
A pump-knight wearing an evasive body. The 0/1 frame does nothing on its own; the card only turns on once you start feeding it black mana, and the cap of two activations a turn means it tops out as a 2/1 flier, reached by spending an extra on top of the
body it already cost. That ceiling is the point: it is a mana sink that refuses to scale into a real clock, a place for leftover black mana to land in the early turns of an aggressive or sacrifice shell. The interesting part is the timing rather than the size. Each pump resolves at instant speed, so the flies can hold mana through a turn and rewrite combat math the opponent thought was settled, sandbagging a +1/+0 to push two evasive damage past blockers that never had a vote. Flying keeps the offense honest in the other direction too: it answers the ground entirely, so the toughness staying at 1 only matters against burn and other targeted removal, not against bodies trying to wall it. A narrow engine with a narrow payoff, but a clean one: a one-drop flier that converts surplus mana into reach, asking nothing of the board around it and adding nothing back to it.


