Sarkhan, Dragon Ascendant
The Sarkhan that never planeswalks. Rather than the loyalty engine his previous incarnations ran on, this version is a two-drop Druid who only becomes the dragon-riding warlord he's always been on the turns his tribe shows up. Behold is the clever part of the entry: you don't have to cast a Dragon or even commit one to the board, just choose one you control or reveal one from hand to prove the pact, and the Treasure it makes fixes toward the expensive fliers you're beholding. Everything after that is a growth loop keyed to Dragons entering, and the payoff runs on two axes at once: each trigger both stacks him higher and, until end of turn, turns Sarkhan himself into a flying Dragon. That temporary type change lets a cheap body swing over ground stalls the moment your top-end lands, and while he's airborne he counts as a Dragon for any other Dragon-matters card in the deck. Note the timing wrinkle: because Sarkhan is already on the battlefield when he becomes a Dragon, he does not retrigger his own "whenever a Dragon enters" clause, so he grows off the rest of the flock, not off himself. The tension is between the two-mana rate and the empty top of the curve: alone he is a 2/2 that whiffs its enters trigger, so he asks you to already be the Dragon deck rather than to build one around him. That constraint is why a character this iconic gets to cost : the ceiling is enormous, but only after the deck has already committed to scales.
