Pterafractyl

The X in the cost buys the body directly: pour mana into the counters and the printed 1/0 becomes whatever your mana allows, arriving in the air the moment it resolves. The 1/0 base is the quiet part of the design. Nearly every X-counter creature starts at 0/0 or 1/1, so it needs the counters to survive at all; here the toughness is zero, which means without at least a single point of investment the thing dies on entry. That is not an oversight so much as a floor: the card refuses to be a free chump, and the two life it hands you on arrival is the concession, a small buffer that makes even a modest cast feel less like a gamble. Flying is what elevates it past a vanilla mana sink. A scalable evasive threat that can be cast small early to trade in the air or emptied out late as a finisher fills a specific gap in Simic's toolbox, where ramp usually points toward a fixed haymaker rather than a body whose size you get to decide at cast time. The Dinosaur Fractal typing is a tell about its lineage: Fractals are the token-and-counter shell, and stapling that onto a creature you cast rather than generate turns the whole mechanic into a spell you can hold for the right window.