Vexing Gull

Flash and flying on a two-power body: no enters-the-battlefield trigger, no card advantage, just a French-vanilla flier you can hold up at instant speed and deploy on the crack-back. That combination is the whole design. Flash lets the mana you were saving for a counterspell double as a live threat if the opponent plays around your open blue; flying makes the 2/2 a real clock and a clean answer against the air. Ambush Viper and its kin pulled this same trick in green, trading a keyword for deathtouch and a bite in combat; here the reward is evasion and a body that keeps pressuring after combat resolves. A flash flier also fits the tempo pattern blue has leaned on since the earliest days of the color: represent interaction, then commit a threat only once the coast is clear, so every read the opponent makes about your open mana is wrong. On rate this is a Wind Drake that never asked for a premium: same three mana, same 2/2 flying body, with flash bolted on at no extra cost. That is what turns a stat line that would otherwise read as filler into a card that is never dead in hand, because the decision to cast it can always wait for the moment it matters most.