Thornscape Battlemage

Domain-shift modularity, sold one elf at a time. The base mode pays three for a vanilla 2/2, which buys you a seat at the kicker menu rather than the meal itself. Splash red and it answers a creature or burns a face on the way in; splash white and it cracks a problem artifact; pay both and it does each. The Battlemages from this cycle were built around exactly this proposition: a colorpie-defined toolbox you tune at the moment of casting, so a single card carries a removal spell, an artifact answer, or both, depending on what the board demands and what your mana can produce. The design discipline is that the green base never gets to do anything green; the body is deliberately plain so the splash colors are paying for the relevant text, and you only collect the upside when you can afford the extra pip. That makes it a barometer for how greedy a manabase wants to be: reliably reach both R and W and you are buying flexible interaction stapled to a creature; manage only the base cost and you have bought a 2/2. Kicker as a mechanic rewards the patient, mana-rich draw, and few cards in its first wave articulate that bargain as cleanly as this one, which folds two unrelated effects (point damage and artifact destruction) into one creature and lets the player decide, on the stack, which problem it is built to solve today.