Sapphire Drake

A static ability that grants flying to a whole team, gated behind a build-around condition that has nothing to do with flying: the creatures have to carry +1/+1 counters. The grant is conditional in a way most evasion-anthems are not. Where a typical flying lord just keys off a creature type and gives the keyword unconditionally, this one demands a separate counter-matters engine to feed it, which means the card does almost nothing in a deck that is not already stacking counters on its board. The payoff for jumping through that hoop is that it turns a ground-based +1/+1 strategy (which tends to win wide but slow, stalled by blockers) into an evasive one, converting a wall of buffed creatures into an attack that ignores the board. The body itself flies, so even in a deck where the counter theme misfires there is a 4/4 evasive creature to fall back on, but the line on the card is built for the synergy, not the floor. It sits in the same design conversation as later counters-and-evasion enablers, an attempt to give the +1/+1-counter archetype a way to actually close out games rather than merely grow large and get chump-blocked forever.