Centaur Safeguard

A 3/1 for three mana that any green deck or any white deck can field on a single hybrid pip, this is a body designed to attack and to die, and the design leans into the dying. The death trigger reframes that fragile single point of toughness from liability into proposition: when the creature dies (in combat, to removal, to a sacrifice effect), you may gain three life. So the creature that trades down on stats trades up on the exchange, and the trade is optional, a small cushion rather than a forced cost. The shape is a vulnerable, splash-proof beater that asks an opponent to spend an answer it would rather not, because spending that answer never comes clean. The hybrid mana frame was, in the era it first appeared, a deliberate proof that a creature could be flexible without being expensive: cheap enough to slot into either color, aggressive enough to demand a response, self-consoling enough that the response feels like a slight loss. The whole package is a study in making low toughness pay rent.