Workshop Elders

Two abilities stacked on one body, and the second is the payoff the first makes safe. Granting flight to your artifact creatures reads as evasion filler until you notice what the combat trigger does: it reaches into your noncreature artifacts (the mana rocks, the equipment, the signets and treasures that would otherwise sit inert) and animates one into a 4/4 at the beginning of combat, which the static ability then hands wings. The counters make the sizing real rather than nominal; a version that turned an artifact into a 0/0 without them would be animating something into a corpse. What the design is actually doing is expanding the pool of legal attackers on a given turn, and choosing that target after untap but before attackers means the decision responds to the board you are facing rather than the one you planned around. The seven-mana price is the honest tax: by the time this resolves you already own a table of artifacts worth animating, so the payoff is gated behind a developed board rather than sold cheap. The 4/4 Artificer that carries it is deliberately unremarkable, and note that it grants flying but does not have it (nothing here animates the Elders themselves), so the body is not the sell; the engine is. Its ceiling is set entirely by how many noncreature artifacts you can point the trigger at over consecutive turns.