Shrieking Grotesque

A hybrid payoff hidden inside a mono-white frame: the entry trigger checks the mana you actually spent rather than the cost printed on the card, and it only exists if a black source paid into the casting. Route a into the three-mana cost and the gargoyle lands with a discard attached; pay with white alone and there is no trigger at all. This is the rules subtlety that makes the design clean rather than fiddly. The "if was spent" clause is an intervening condition, so on a white-only cast the ability never goes on the stack: nothing triggers, nothing resolves, no empty bookkeeping. The deck that splashed black gets the disruption, the deck that did not gets a plain flier, and neither pays a tax for the other's option. Folding a guild incentive into a single creature this way avoids the bloat of printing two cards or bolting on a kicker line. The timing is what earns the splash: because the strip fires on entry rather than on a combat connection, you bank the discard the turn the 2/1 arrives instead of waiting for an evasive body to grind through blockers. It can hit any player, which matters less than the speed at which the card is paid off. A flier that carries its full text only when your manabase reaches across the color pie, and asks for nothing when it cannot.