Azorius Herald

Cast it for nothing but white and it self-destructs: it enters, gains you four life, and sacrifices itself before it can swing once. Spend a single blue mana somewhere in the cost, even one off-color pip from a dual or a splash, and the sacrifice trigger resolves harmlessly, leaving behind an unblockable two-power body that already padded your life total on the way in. The card is a payment puzzle built to teach the second color: the reward is there, but only the player committed to both halves of Azorius collects it. The structure is unusually clean for the era of "unless you paid X" triggers, when that conditional was the standard lever for steering a deck toward the right manabase. What lifts it past curiosity is the shape of the failure mode. Most cards punish wrong mana with a worse rate; this one punishes you by handing back no creature at all, while still stapling the four life on. So the white-only cast is diminished rather than bricked, a gentler conditional than it first reads as. The unblockable clause is what justifies the whole apparatus: an evasive clock that chips in every combat, paired with a one-time life cushion on entry, is the incremental edge that rewards a deck willing to run its lands in white and blue together rather than splash for the trigger and walk away.