Steam Spitter

A 1/5 with reach is a defensive premise that someone tried to bolt offense onto, and the seam shows. The activated ability buys power one red mana at a time, never toughness, which means the creature stays a five-toughness blocker that can be pumped into an attacker only by pouring a second color's mana into it. That is the tension this design never resolves: the body wants to sit back and trade up against fliers, while the ability begs you to splash red and turn it sideways. The red cost is the tell. A mono-green deck cannot touch the upside at all, and a red-green deck rarely wants a 1/5 leading the charge, so the two halves point at different decks and serve neither cleanly. Pump abilities that add only power were an early-era staple for making fixed bodies feel flexible, but most of them sat on creatures whose toughness already justified the attack. Here the math runs the other way: every red mana spent moves a point of damage forward off a frame built to absorb it, never to deal it. What you get is a flying blocker with a button you press in the unlikely event the game stalls and you happen to have red to spare, and the button never makes the wall harder to break.