Shaper Apprentice

The conditional flier is among the oldest tribal payoff shapes: a body that stays grounded on its own but takes to the air the moment its kin show up. Here the contract is the lightest possible version of that idea, a static clause that hands the 2/1 flying for as long as you control any other Merfolk, no death-and-return needed and no cost to switch it back and forth. That low bar is the point. The card is built for the floor of a tribal curve, where a single one-drop or a token already in play turns it on, and it asks nothing more than a board that stays populated. What balances it is the fragility on both ends of the conditional: a one-toughness creature is easy to answer at the best of times, and the flight it wants to keep evaporates the instant its last ally dies, so the evasion you are paying for is only as durable as the creatures standing beside it. This is scaffolding, not a payoff that carries a deck: it leans on the shell doing its job, common-rarity glue that makes an aggressive Merfolk board feel like a connected unit rather than a pile of bodies.