Ribbon Snake

The cleanest distillation of Prophecy's central design idea: a set built around abilities any player could activate, deliberately blurring the line between your cards and your opponent's. Here the keyword that defines the card, the flying that makes a 2/3 an evasive threat, is something the table can switch off for two generic mana, turning an air-blocker into a grounded one at the exact moment it would have mattered. The design hands your opponent a removal-adjacent lever without a removal spell: they can drop the snake out of the air to push an attacker through, or pull it down to set up a favorable block, all at instant speed. It is a creature whose defining stat is conditional in a way no static keyword usually is, since the player least interested in your flier getting value is the one holding the off-switch. Prophecy is remembered as one of the weaker sets of its era, and cards like this are why: the shared-activation experiment produced effects that read as clever on paper and play out as a tax on your own evasion. The body is a fair 2/3 and the rate is standard for a three-mana flier, but every game it is in, the flying it advertises comes with an asterisk the opponent gets to cash.