Spotter Thopter

The Prototype keyword turns one card into a spendable curve: cast it early as a cheap flying body, or hold it for the full-fat version when the mana comes. What makes this particular Thopter worth the second look is how its enters-the-battlefield scry scales off power rather than a fixed number. At the prototype cost, it comes down as a 2/3 flier that digs two cards deep; the eight-mana casting swells the body to a 4/5 and doubles the dig to scry 4. Most cards that let you smooth your draws pin the smoothing to a flat value, so the reward for going bigger here is that the card fills two jobs at once: an evasive clock and a top-of-library filter whose reach grows with the investment. The design tension is that the payoff and the cost sit on the same axis. You get the deeper scry precisely when you commit to spending eight, and the cheaper mode buys tempo at the price of a thinner peek. It is a clean illustration of what Prototype was built to do: fold a card's early-game and late-game identities into a single object, then let the game state decide which one you cast.