Skarrgan Hellkite

Riot's genius is that it hands the choice to the caster instead of the card, and this Dragon is the mechanic's clearest payoff: haste turns it into an immediate flyer that ends games fast, while the counter unlocks a repeatable pinger that snipes creatures or reaches the last points of a life total. Most riot cards make that call a genuine coin flip, weighing tempo against a slightly bigger body. Here the branches point at two different roles entirely. Pick haste and you have a five-mana beater that gets in before the board stabilizes; pick the counter and you have an engine, a flyer that keeps trading two damage a turn for mana into whatever threatens you. The activated ability is why the counter mode carries so much weight: it does not just make the Dragon bigger, it gives you a sink for every excess mana in the late game, and splitting the damage among one or two targets means it answers small board states as cleanly as it finishes a player. The tension is deliberate: the mode you want on turn five (on the battlefield swinging) is rarely the mode you want on turn nine (a machine gun that never turns off), and reading which one the game actually needs is the whole exercise. That single choice, made once and permanent, is the real design underneath a body that otherwise looks like any other five-mana flyer.