Zookeeper Mechan

A mana dork stapled to a mana sink, which is a stranger combination than it sounds. The : Add half is pure ramp: a red-producing body that survives most incidental damage on its 1/3 frame and helps you cast the expensive thing a turn early. The other half spends that same mana on itself and everything around it: a seven-mana pump handing a creature you control +4/+0 until end of turn, capped at sorcery speed so it can never ambush a blocker or steal a race with a surprise. What makes the design shift across the game is that the two abilities matter at different points. Early, you want it tapping for mana to accelerate; late, once you have mana to spare, it becomes a repeatable finisher that turns a stalled board into lethal. The sorcery restriction is the honest price on that late-game mode: no combat trick, no bluff, just a slow, telegraphed way to convert a flooded board into damage across multiple turns. Most red one- and two-drops that ramp go dead once you have hit your curve; this one keeps a job on both sides of the game, which is the quiet virtue of a mana producer that also knows how to spend.