Sandbar Merfolk

Urza's Saga is where cycling first taught players that a do-nothing body could still be worth a slot, and this is the most stripped-down version of that lesson. The creature half is filler: a 1/1 with no evasion, no relevant keyword, nothing that wants to be on the battlefield. The cycling cost is the entire point. When you draw it on a turn you needed a land or a spell, you spend two mana to turn it back into a fresh card; when you draw it in a game that has gone long and a body matters, you cast it. That optionality is the whole design pitch of the cycling mechanic, and Sandbar Merfolk demonstrates it without a single complicating wrinkle: no payoff text, no cycling trigger, no cost reduction. It is the control group against which every later cycling creature gets measured, the version that shows you exactly what the keyword is buying before designers started layering effects on top of it. The merfolk type is incidental flavor here rather than tribal glue; the card was built to smooth a draw, not to fill out a board. What makes the slot interesting is the tax: two mana to cycle is deliberately steep enough that you rarely want to do it on curve, which keeps the card honest as a late-game release valve rather than a free cantrip.