Spirit of the Spires

The anthem is the payoff, but the payoff here is toughness, not power. Flying tribal decks usually stack up the way any go-wide deck does: small evasive bodies that die to a single ping, a stray sweeper, or the wrong block. Handing every other flyer +0/+1 changes which trades are profitable. A one-mana flyer that dies to a 2/1 in the air now survives it; a board of X/1 spirits and faeries stops folding to incidental reach damage that would otherwise clear the whole team. The 2/4 body on this Spirit is built to the same brief: it is a poor attacker but a genuine obstacle, a flyer that holds the ground and the air while the rest of the team gets fractionally sturdier. The choice to buff toughness rather than power is the whole design thesis, and it is deliberately the less flashy half of the anthem menu. Power anthems escalate a race you are already winning; toughness anthems keep the fragile clock alive long enough to close, and they blunt the exact removal (small burn, incidental pings, symmetrical sweepers set one turn too shallow) that flyer decks fear most. Excluding itself from the buff marks it as support rather than finisher: it wants a board beneath it, not to win alone.