Caldera Kavu

Both activated abilities reach outside the card's base color, and that is the whole point: a red creature that can only fully express itself if you are paying black and green to operate it. The first ability spends black for a repeatable point of size; the second spends green to repaint the creature into any color you choose, which reads as filler until you recall how much of the era's removal and protection keyed off a creature's color. Becoming blue to slip under a color-specific kill spell, or red to satisfy an aura or a pump that demanded it, or anything-but-the-color a Circle of Protection was set to, was a genuine lever in a format thick with color-hosing effects. Both costs draw on red's allied colors, black and green, so the card rewards building down the Jund arc rather than reaching across the color wheel; the deeper into all three colors you go, the more of the printed text actually comes online. The body is plain and was never asked to do the work. The design lives entirely in those two off-color activations, which embody a particular early-era philosophy: that flexibility paid for in a second and third color was worth more than raw efficiency in one. It is a Kavu, but the type line is the least interesting thing here. What lasts is how literally three colors must converge before one card pays out in full.