Winged Portent

Cleave lives on a single tension: the base spell reads narrow, and paying the surcharge deletes the qualifier that made it narrow. Here the bracketed words are "with flying," so the printed version is a dedicated skies payoff, drawing nothing off a board without wings. Casting it at its face cost commits you to fliers as a plan; it rewards a wide bench of evasive attackers already dedicated to the air. Pay the cleave cost instead (three more mana, with a green pip added alongside the blue) and the same instant becomes a board-agnostic refill that counts every creature regardless of wings, a green-blue midrange draw spell that just wants a full battlefield. The elegant part is how far apart the two modes point: one half serves a fliers-aggro or token build swinging in the air; the other serves a Simic go-wide deck with almost none of the same cards. One spell, two archetypes that overlap barely anywhere else. Instant speed matters to both halves, letting either version fire on the crackback to draw off attackers that survived combat, or resolve in response to a sweeper so the creatures are still counted before they die. That is the whole cleave idea in miniature: flexibility priced onto a spell rather than handed over free, with the two costs aimed at genuinely different decks.