Stoic Ephemera

A 5/5 flyer that blocks once and dies is a strange creature to evaluate, because the body misrepresents what it actually offers. Defender means it never swings, and the sacrifice clause means any block, against a 1/1 or a dragon, is its last. So the printed stats are not the deal: the deal is a single block that can trade with one attacker, dressed up as a wall. Where a true blocker holds the ground every turn, this trades itself the first time it does its job, which makes it less a defensive piece than a one-shot answer that happens to sit on the battlefield until needed. The 5/5 flying frame matters only in that it sets the ceiling on what it can eat: it blocks fliers other walls cannot reach, and it kills anything up to its size on the way out. That puts the design somewhere between a wall and a sacrificial chump, with the upside that it picks its moment rather than absorbing damage passively. The tension it resolves is the perennial white problem of stopping evasive threats without a clean removal spell: it answers the air, once, and asks nothing but the body it was already spending.