Striped Riverwinder

The cycling-for-one trick is the entire reason this serpent exists. A 5/5 hexproof body for seven mana is a deeply unappealing rate on its own: too slow to matter, too clunky to cast on curve, the kind of fatty that would otherwise rot in a draft pool. But cycling for a single blue mana inverts that math. The card stops being a creature you intend to cast and becomes a one-mana cantrip that happens to have a castable mode in the late game, when you have flooded out and a hexproof beater that dodges spot removal is suddenly worth seven mana. That dual identity is the design lesson: cheap cycling on an expensive, hard-to-deal-with body lets one card serve two completely different turns. Early, it smooths your draws for the price of any other cantrip. Late, it deploys a clock that targeted removal cannot touch and that demands a sweeper or a chump every turn. Hexproof here is not the headline so much as the insurance that makes the cast mode worth the cost when you do reach it. Wizards has printed plenty of bodies with cheap cycling, but the combination of a resilient finisher and a one-mana cycling cost is what keeps this one perpetually drawable: it is rarely a dead card, and on the right turn it is a problem.