Skyshroud Vampire

A pump ability that eats its own resources is a quiet design joke, and this one pays in a currency that should hurt: it discards creature cards from hand to grow, two points of size for each body fed in. At five mana for a 3/3 flyer, the printed stats sit below the curve, so the activation is where the card earns its place, converting dead or surplus creatures in hand into combat damage. The discipline that keeps this from being a free engine is that it spends cards rather than mana: no per-turn ceiling, but every activation thins the hand, and a vampire that has run out of fuel reverts to a 3/3. A hand glutted with creatures it would rather not cast turns those bodies into reach; a draw with nothing to spare leaves the ability dead, since the fuel comes entirely from cards you are willing to bury unused. The trade is the design's spine. It pairs flying evasion with a discard-as-cost pump, a structure later sets refined into graveyard-matters and madness payoffs, where discarding a creature stopped being pure loss. Here, before those payoffs existed, the discard is simply a cost: you give up the bodies you cannot use to buy the reach to finish with the one that flies.