Spire Mangler

Flash is the entire pitch here. A 2/1 flier that hands another flier +2/+0 on entry is unremarkable at sorcery speed, but arriving at instant speed turns the pump into a combat-step ambush: hold up three mana during your opponent's declare-attackers or blockers step, and the surprise flier both adds a body and swings the math on a creature already in the air. On defense, it flashes in to eat an attacking flier that thought it was trading up. On offense, it lands after blockers are declared, so the +2/+0 falls on a flier already through, converting a chip attack into a real clock. The self-synergy is the safety net: because it has flying, the enter trigger can always target the Mangler itself, resolving into a temporary 4/1, so the pump never fizzles even on an empty board and reads as evasive burst that dodges the sorcery-speed vulnerability of most one-shot aggression. What holds it in check is the single toughness on both halves of the equation: the +2/+0 does nothing for survivability, so any flier it pumps still dies to the smallest bit of interference, and the ambush works best when there is already an evasive board to leverage. It belongs to a small class of black fliers that push the color into the tempo lane usually reserved for blue, using flash as the timing lever rather than a mid-combat trick spell.