Xira Arien

Among the original Legends multicolor legends, this is the one whose design has aged into something almost modern: a repeatable card-draw faucet stapled to a flying body, where the activation costs exactly what the creature did to cast. Drawing a card on demand would be trivially good if it were cheap; locking both the casting cost and the activation to BRG plus a tap symbol is what keeps the engine honest. It restricts the wizard to decks that have already committed to the hardest three-color manabase, and even then asks them to spend a full turn's worth of mana, and the tap, for a single card. The "target player" clause does the more interesting work: in multiplayer it is political, a draw you can sell or gift to broker an alliance, while in a duel pointing it at yourself burns six mana over two turns for two cards, an awful rate that the multiplayer context redeems. Jund-color and group-hug builders have circled the card for decades because the shape (cheap legend, repeatable single draw, no built-in payoff) invites the deck to supply the payoff a Notion Thief or an Underworld Dreams can punish, turning a generous-looking ability into a weapon. Wizards later revisited the character with a more pushed engine, but the original remains the cleaner statement of the idea: a wizard who sells card draw by the turn, to whoever is paying.