Telethopter

A colorless artifact built around an oddly literal premise: a thopter that grants itself flight by recruiting the rest of your board as ground crew. The activated ability reads like a flavor pun made mechanical, and the rate reflects it. At a 3/1 for four mana, the body is already underweight, and the engine self-imposes a steep tax: every time the thopter takes to the air it ties up an untapped creature you control, and it can only ever lift itself, never another attacker. So the math runs backwards from how an evasion engine usually works. Most flying enablers want a wide board to push through; this one wants a wide board purely as fuel, and contributes nothing toward building that board. What you get is a single repeatable threat that can convert a stalled ground position into three points in the air, but only by stranding blockers you might rather keep back. The cost is at least clean: tapping an untapped creature you control is the whole price, with no mana attached and no once-per-turn clause, so you can grant flying as many times as you have creatures to tap. That flexibility is real, even if the body cashing in the favor rarely justifies the creatures tapped to grant it. The design comes from an era before evasion enablers were priced to be reliable, and the awkwardness is the point rather than an oversight.