Sea Scryer

Blue ramp on a creature body is itself the wrinkle: the color that almost never gets to accelerate taps for colorless without restriction, and only charges you when you actually want the mana filtered into blue. That split is the whole design. The free colorless tap makes the 1/1 a genuine accelerant for artifacts and generic costs, while the second mode adds a tax before it produces its own color; you pay a mana to convert, so the card is happiest powering out things that do not care what color the mana is. The fragile frame and the summoning-sick first turn place it in the family of early creatures that trade durability for a head start, the same bargain Llanowar Elves makes in green, just slower to produce its own color. What it represents is an early answer to a question Wizards has rarely revisited: what does blue ramp look like when it has to be paid for instead of given away? The two-tier structure (colorless for nothing, blue for a fee) is a cleaner statement of that idea than most of what followed.