Tetravus

A modular creature in the most literal sense: the body is a chassis that disassembles into flying tokens and reassembles at upkeep, with the +1/+1 counters acting as interchangeable parts. The design is remarkable for how early it landed. Counters as a resource you could shuffle between forms, tokens that remembered their origin, an upkeep loop that let a single threat present as either a 4/4 flyer or a spread of 1/1 flyers depending on what the board demanded: this is mid-2000s design vocabulary appearing in 1994, on an artifact set whose other marquee constructions were mostly static or one-shot. The "can't be enchanted" rider on the Tetravites is the tell of the era (a hard-coded answer to a specific contemporary problem, written onto the token rather than abstracted into a keyword), and the exile-to-recombine clause anticipates the much later convention of tokens being functionally distinct from the permanent that made them. The rate was never the draw: six mana is a lot to pay for an engine that has to survive to your upkeep before it does anything beyond swinging as a flyer. What kept it in conversation was the shape of that engine, which Wizards has revisited under different names ever since: a single permanent that splits into a swarm, the swarm folding back into a single permanent, the counters carrying the value between forms.