Skyreach Manta

Sunburst made artifacts care about the rainbow, and this is the cleanest payoff in the cycle: a flier whose entire body is purchased at casting time. Cast it off a single color and you get a 1/1 with flying for five, a humiliating rate; cast it with all five colors of mana and it lands as a 5/5 evasive threat that dwarfs most fatties of its era. The 0/0 base is the whole bargain. Without counters it dies on the spot, so the card is functionally unplayable in a deck that cannot stretch its mana across colors, and devastating in one built to do exactly that. That made it the marquee reward for the five-color artifact decks that came together around this period, the ones leaning on every two-color land and mana rock they could assemble to turn fixing into stats. Flying is the multiplier that justifies the effort: the same color-greed that pumps the body also clears the air, turning a pile of off-color lands into an evasive clock that closes a game by itself. It is one of the rare creatures whose printed power and toughness tell you nothing, because the number you actually get is a measure of how committed your manabase is to the rainbow.