River Herald Scout

Explore reduced to its plainest, cheapest expression: one enters-the-battlefield trigger that either fixes a land drop or grows the body, with the reveal deciding which. Hit a land and this 1/2 puts it into your hand and stays a 1/2; hit a nonland and it becomes a 2/3 while you choose whether to leave that card where it sits or send it to the graveyard. That single fork is the whole reason it earns a slot over a vanilla two-drop. The choice on a nonland matters more than it looks, because explore buries the card into the yard rather than discarding it: a graveyard deck can seed fuel this way, but nothing that pays off discard triggers gets fed. What balances the effect is that you never select the outcome; the order of your deck does, so the scout is at the mercy of what it reveals. Everything of value is packed into that entry trigger, which is precisely why the card reads better in shells built to reuse it. Blink and recursion turn a one-shot explore into a recurring one, and the same modest body becomes a repeatable engine for counters, graveyard filling, or smoother land drops depending on what the deck is chasing. On its own it is a modest body with a small upside; in a deck that fishes for that trigger again, the 1/2 stat line stops being the point.