Sky Spirit

A clean expression of what a three-mana flier with first strike is supposed to be: a body that wins the air outright and survives most early ground trades on the way up. The keyword pairing does the strategic work. Flying picks the lane (the air, where blockers are scarce), and first strike makes that lane brutal, since anything sent up to chump or trade dies before it deals damage back. Against another evasive creature of the same size, this one comes down on top; against ground defense, it simply ignores the question. The cost is the tax: spreading three mana across two colors keeps the rate honest, asking for a real commitment to a blue-white shell rather than handing a flier of this quality to anyone. Spirits would later become a tribe with a deep mechanical identity, but this predates that lineage cohering: a vanilla-plus body whose value lives entirely in the interaction of its two keywords rather than in any text the tribe gave it later. Power creep eventually outclasses it as the floor rises on what a two-color three-drop should offer, but the underlying design logic (evasion plus damage priority stapled to one cheap creature) never stops being correct.