Troublesome Spirit

A 3/4 flyer for four mana whose rent comes due not when you spend mana but when you would rather be holding it open. The end-step tap is the entire transaction here, and it falls in a precise, painful spot: anything a blue deck wants to do on the opponent's turn (instant-speed removal, counterspells, end-step tricks) needs untapped lands, and this strips all of yours away before that window opens. It is a blue creature that punishes the instinct to play like a blue deck. The drawback is the reversible kind of period design that asked you to break your own lock rather than live beneath it: untap your lands, commit to sorcery-speed plays, or simply never want open mana, and the cost evaporates. The math the designers chased was an evasive four-drop that, in a deck built to dump all its mana each turn, owes nothing at all. Whether that deck ever quite existed is the question the card leaves hanging. The body is genuine, the flying is genuine, and the tax lands hardest on exactly the players most inclined to want a blue four-drop in the first place. It belongs to an early-era line of experiments in how much a good creature should pay for the privilege of being good.