Stitched Drake

A 3/4 flyer for three mana sits above the blue curve: that body trades up against most early aggressors and pressures life totals from the air faster than blue creatures usually manage. The exile cost is what pays for it. You need a creature card already in the graveyard, and you have to be willing to remove it permanently, which means the drake is weakest in the opening turns when your yard is empty and best once the game has put a few bodies there for you. The design folds the rate into a tempo question: cast it too early and you have nothing to feed it; hold it and you are sitting on a strong threat that demands the right moment. The creature-only restriction also draws a quiet line against reanimation strategies, since both want the same dead bodies in the yard and the drake spends one for good rather than bringing it back. It is the older, costlier cousin of how delve later sold a discount: there you shave mana off the cost, here you pay full price up front and keep the entire body. The card rewards a deck that fills its graveyard incidentally and can spare a creature it no longer needs, converting an inert resource into an evasive, hard-hitting threat.