Vampire Bats

Each black mana you hold open turns into a temporary point of evasive damage, capped at two activations per turn, and that cap is the discipline that holds the rate down. The body is a rounding error, a 0/1 flyer with no real combat presence of its own, so the card lives entirely on its mana sink. The interesting thing about the per-turn governor is that it constrains tempo rather than raw size: the bat can only swing for so much in a single turn no matter how much black mana sits untapped, so even a fast start stays a slow clock that scales across multiple turns instead of spiking for a kill out of nowhere. The shape (tiny evasive body, repeatable mana sink, hard cap on activations) is one the game has returned to repeatedly, with later designs reaching for cleaner executions of the same evasive-mana-sink idea. The conservatism is what marks its age: a flying one-drop in black was treated as something that needed a 0/1 floor and a per-turn cap, where modern black one-drops get stats, triggers, and lifelink stapled on without apology. Read it as a fossil of the era when black's evasive threats were rationed by the activation cap rather than by the printed line.