Sunscape Battlemage

The Battlemage cycle turned kicker into a color-pie sampler: each member is a base creature in one color whose two kicker costs reach into its allied colors, letting the caster buy whichever rider the board wants. This one anchors in white as a plain 2/2 and rents green's anti-flyer removal and blue's card draw, so a single casting can be a bare body on turn three, a winged-creature kill, a two-card refill, or all three at once for the full . The design problem it resolves is the perennial flexibility-versus-cost tension: a card that does three different jobs usually taxes your tempo because you commit to one mode at deckbuilding, but kicker defers the decision to the moment of casting and charges only for the modes actually taken. The drawback is structural and honest: a creature meant to come down on curve as a plain 2/2 frequently will, and only a deck with green and blue mana to spare unlocks the rest. That makes it a measuring stick for a particular kind of three-color midrange manabase, the build that can afford to overpay on a single spell because it has surplus mana and nowhere better to spend it. The clauses themselves stay inside the color pie: destroying flyers is squarely green's job (the color that has always answered the air), and drawing two is blue's, so the kicker frame is gathering allied-color effects rather than reaching past them.