Timid Drake

A flier with a body that reads as undercosted until you reach the rider that pays for it: any creature entering, yours or your opponent's, sends it back to hand. The drawback is unusual in that it punishes your own development as readily as the table's, inverting the normal incentive structure of a tempo creature. You want to deploy it last, onto a board that has stopped growing, and you want it to stay that way. That makes it most at home in a control shell that has quit casting creatures, where the body sits unmolested and the bounce clause never fires. Every blink, token, and go-wide effect becomes a liability rather than an asset, a reminder that the card was built long before "creatures entering" became a payoff worth chasing rather than a cost to play around. The design reads as Weatherlight-era experimentation with self-referential triggers: a strong body gated behind a condition the board keeps trying to break for you. And the trigger reaches no further than itself: it returns this creature and nothing else, so there is no value engine hiding underneath, no enters-the-battlefield effect to re-buy, only a flier whose worth depends entirely on how disciplined the deck around it is about staying off the battlefield. There is no safe window to protect it either; the trigger answers to any creature anyone resolves, so the only real defense is a board that nobody, including you, intends to add to.