Secretkeeper

The flying clause is conditional on a comparison the whole table is bidding on: you need a fatter hand than every opponent, which means their draws, plays, and discards move the threshold as much as yours do. Win the count and you have a 4/4 flier; fall behind and you are back to a grounded 2/2 with no abilities at all. That makes this a payoff stapled to a deckbuilding mandate, a Spirit built for the hand-size-matters subtheme that ran through its era's blue cards, where stockpiling cards was treated as its own axis rather than a means to an end. The trouble is that the condition fights the game's natural gravity: you draw a card a turn, then spend cards to affect the board, so your hand trends downward exactly when you most want to be deploying threats, and an opponent can flip the buff off simply by reloading their own hand. To keep this online you have to refuse to play out, which is the opposite of what a 2/2 beater wants, or you have to attack the comparison from the other end, emptying opponents' hands with discard or outpacing a symmetrical draw effect like Howling Mine. It is an artifact of a design moment when Wizards was probing whether hand-size could anchor an archetype rather than just gate a discard outlet, with the buff's symmetry left squarely in opponents' hands.