Vulpikeet

The workhorse of the mutate mechanic's flying package, and a case study in why the keyword needed a reliable payoff. Mutate is a fragile way to build a creature: every merged pile sits one removal spell away from collapsing back into a mediocre body or nothing at all, so the archetype leaned on stacking bonuses that made each mutation trigger reward you no matter what sat underneath. This card contributes a self-sizing counter: fold it onto a non-Human pile and it grows, while handing off evasion to everything that pile becomes. For its full cost it is a plain flier; for its mutate cost it lifts a ground creature into the air and adds to the top of the stack a trigger that any later mutation keeps feeding. That layering is the mechanic's engine: abilities from the cards beneath survive, so a single evasive shell can accumulate death triggers, activated abilities, and combat keywords from creatures that would each be unremarkable alone. The counter-on-mutate clause rewards piling on rather than playing it safe, since the growth scales with how deep you commit to the stack. Priced above the curve as a standalone body, its real value shows in a deck constructed to exploit the keyword: connective tissue that keeps a precarious pile worth assembling in the first place.