Brine Shaman

This black two-drop wants blue mana to do its most interesting trick, a cross-color reach designed before any of the frameworks that would later formalize it. The first activation is a sacrifice pump any deck running the card can reach: tap, feed it a creature (itself included, if the body has nothing better to do), and a target gets +2/+2 for the turn. The second is a hard counter on creature spells gated behind , no tap required but a sacrifice plus a blue-heavy cost that locks it out unless your manabase already runs the second color. That split is the whole design tension. Both abilities pay their sacrifice from the battlefield, not the graveyard: you trade a permanent you control for the effect, spending bodies rather than recycling them. The counterspell clause answers only creature spells, dead against everything else, a narrow targeting window that has since become a familiar design pattern but was here still doing the work of justifying a blue effect stapled onto a black body. The split-color activation predates the explicit gold and hybrid templates; here it is just raw mana symbols in the cost line, with no shard, no guild, no signpost. The result reads as two halves of two different decks fused into one creature: a sacrifice outlet for one color, a recurring creature-counter only when the colors cooperate.