Starbreach Whale

Pay for the enters-the-battlefield trigger now, pay for the body later: that is the schedule this whale runs. Cast it from hand for and it fires surveil 2 immediately, digging and loading the graveyard for two mana before exiling itself at the beginning of the next end step. On a later turn you recast it from exile for the full , firing surveil a second time and this time leaving a 3/5 flier on the table. Two payments, two triggers, one permanent when it counts. That splits the card cleanly into a cheap early filter and a delayed evasive threat, and the surveil is the connective tissue between the two halves: bin what you do not need on the first pass, keep the second look for when the body actually sticks. The 5 toughness is doing quiet load-bearing work here, because a warped creature you paid for twice cannot afford to be a burn-or-combat throwaway; a flier of that size survives most of what gets pointed at it. The design's real trick is that there is no drawback clause anywhere, no sacrifice tax or opponent-draws tax paid for the front-loaded value. The only cost is a mana schedule, and the mechanic asks you to treat that schedule as the card's strategic axis rather than as a downside: when you want the filtering, when you want the body, and how much you are willing to pay to have them arrive on separate turns.