Sergeant-at-Arms

The clean expression of kicker as a mana sink: pay for a 2/3 that holds the line early, or pay it twice and the same card arrives as a 2/3 plus two 1/1 Soldiers, four power across three bodies. The point of the design is flood insurance without deck cost. A control or midrange deck that runs out of early plays in the late game still wants a card that scales, and this one scales by making attackers and chump-blockers rather than by drawing into more spells. The Soldier tokens matter beyond raw stats: they feed convoke, anthems, and sacrifice fodder in a way a single larger creature cannot, and against spot removal the kicked mode is resilient, since a Doom Blade or a Fatal Push takes down one body while the rest keep swinging. That elasticity, a single card carrying two entirely different roles depending on how much mana is available, is exactly what kicker was built to deliver: white's tidiest take on the mechanic, never a dead draw on turn three, never a dead topdeck when the game goes long.