Tattered Apparition

The Shade template, drawn out to its plainest terms. Black has printed this creature type across nearly every era: a small evasive body with a repeatable pump ability that turns floating mana into combat damage, from Frozen Shade onward. What that pattern buys is a threat that never dies to a size-based removal spell in the abstract, because its size is a variable you set on the crack-back. A blocker sized to trade with a 2/2 is wrong the moment black mana is open, and the flying here means the pump does not have to fight through ground defenders to matter. The cost of the design is that every point of extra power is two mana not spent on anything else, so the body scales only as fast as your land drops and only in a turn where you have nothing better to do with the black. That makes it a mana sink for the late game rather than a tempo play for the early one: it does nothing you want on the turn you cast it, and everything you want three turns later when the game has stalled and the excess mana has nowhere else to go. A workmanlike floor-filler in the lineage of creatures whose ceiling is entirely a function of how long the game runs.