Cerulean Wyvern

Protection from green here is not a defensive scrap of evasion; it is targeted hate stapled to a flier, an answer to the era's fat green creatures that declares this Drake cannot be blocked, damaged, or pumped into a profitable trade by them. Protection in this period was a more aggressive design lever than it later became, drawn narrowly along color lines so that a single creature could swing a matchup. The flying alone keeps the body relevant against anyone: a 3/3 evasive clock is never a blank, even when the protection clause is doing nothing. But against green, the protection converts that clock into something unanswerable, slipping past every blocker green can muster while shrugging off the damage from green's combat tricks and the targeting of its removal. The five-mana cost is the tax for that conditional dominance: full freight for a flier whose ceiling depends on the color sitting across the table, with a respectable floor that flies regardless. It comes from the moment when Magic still trusted color-pie hosers to carry weight, when one creature's reason for existing was to be miserable against a single color and merely fine against everyone else. The design reads as a curiosity now precisely because the philosophy behind it has narrowed: protection-from-a-color was once a viable thing to print on a midrange flier and ask players to want, and this Drake is a clean fossil of that calculus.