Seacoast Drake

The toughness of three is the operative number on one of blue's oldest defensive shapes: a flyer that contributes nothing on offense but sits above the reach of one-damage pings and most one-drop bodies, surviving trades a 1/2 would lose. That extra point of toughness is what justifies printing and reprinting this kind of body across decades; it stonewalls early air and the small ground attackers that fast decks lean on, buying a turn or two while a slower deck assembles its plan. What it lacks is the activated ability that this defensive lineage usually carries to earn the slot: the tap-to-block trick or pseudo-vigilance that fleshed out earlier blue walls-on-wings. Here the flying body is the entire offering, which keeps it firmly in the clean common role rather than the build-around. It occupies the gap between a true wall and a real evasive threat, committing to neither job: a placeholder for tempo and control shells that want to stay alive past the early turns without spending a card that does anything afterward.