Vaporous Djinn

An early experiment in turning phasing from a downside into a tax. Mirage introduced phasing as a keyword built around things temporarily ceasing to exist, and most of its cards treated that as a fixed cost: blockers that wink out on your turn, attackers you cannot rely on. Here the mechanic is bolted onto an evasive body and handed a release valve. Pay during your upkeep and the creature stays a 3/4 flier; skip the payment and the Djinn vanishes, leaving you nothing to defend with and nothing to attack into. The design tension lives in the recurring drain on your blue: the body is fine, but spending two mana every upkeep eats into the pool you would otherwise leave open for the instant-speed plays blue actually wants to be making later in the turn cycle. Where most phasing cards exploit the rules quirk that a phased-out permanent dodges sorcery-speed removal and board wipes during an opponent's window, this one hands the controller the choice to never phase out at all, which quietly undercuts that protection in exchange for reliability. It is phasing rendered as a soft, cumulative-feeling tax without the counter bookkeeping, a snapshot of a set still working out what its strangest keyword was for.