Sandbar Serpent

The cycling cycle where the mechanic was born produced one of these in every color, and the Serpent is the blue baseline: a fine-but-unremarkable creature whose real job is to never be a dead card. The design logic is the whole point. A 3/4 for five mana is filler, a body that clogs an opening hand when you need lands or action. Cycling solves that by giving the card a second mode that costs almost nothing to access, so the creature stops being a gamble on the draw and becomes a hedge against it. You run it because the floor is "draw a card," and the ceiling is a serviceable blocker that trades up against early aggression. That floor-raising design has aged far better than the body has; cycling went on to anchor entire archetypes and got reprinted across cycles for decades, but the principle was already fully formed in a Serpent nobody remembers casting. Its place in the lineage is as a clean teaching example: the rate on the creature barely matters, because the card was built so the rate would rarely be the thing you cared about.