Runescale Stormbrood // Chilling Screech

Two roles in two colors, sharing nothing but a card slot: the front is a red flier, the back a blue counter, and the split is deliberately non-synergistic. You cast one or the other, not both in sequence, so this is less a modal card than a hedge against which half of the game your deck ends up wanting. Chilling Screech is a hard counter with a low ceiling: it stops any spell of mana value two or less outright, no pay-to-ignore clause, but everything expensive walks right past it, which caps the interaction to the earliest, cheapest threats. What keeps casting it from being a real cost is the Omen tag on the back: instead of exiling after it resolves, it shuffles into the library, so spending the counter turn two does not burn the Dragon you might draw again later. Runescale Stormbrood, meanwhile, is a clock whose speed is a readout of your spell density. A 2/4 flier grows +2/+0 each time you cast a noncreature spell or a Dragon spell, so its damage on any given turn is really a count of the triggers you can chain that turn, and it does nothing extra in a deck that cannot feed it. Neither face is pushed on rate: the two-mana counter cap and the flier's dependence on a spell-heavy shell are the price of buying both an early answer and a late threat out of one card.