Waker of Waves

A seven-mana whale carries an obvious liability: it is dead weight in your opening hand and clunky in the early turns, the kind of top-heavy finisher that punishes you for drawing it early. The design answer here is to build the escape hatch directly onto the card. For two mana you discard it and dig two deep, keeping one card and burying the other, so the creature you were never going to cast converts into smoothing at instant speed. That second mode is the reason the card holds together. When the body does land, the -1/-0 shrink clips every opposing creature, softening a wide board and flipping a handful of combat calculations. When the body does not, the discard turns the corpse into card selection at a price you were happy to pay. The graveyard drop is not throwaway either: the buried card feeds delve, reanimation, and any strategy that counts on a stocked yard, so a whale that never resolves still contributes from the dirt. This is a familiar solution to a familiar problem, and the split is unusually clean. The static ability is passive value when the creature sticks; the activated ability is insurance when it does not. Few expensive threats resolve the tension between "I need a finisher" and "I hate drawing this early" by letting you convert the one you don't want into two looks at the ones you do.