Craw Wurm

The vanilla green fatty as a deliberate design artifact. From Alpha forward, this was the yardstick Wizards used to price a creature with no abilities: six mana for a six-power body, no trample, no evasion, no triggers, no protection. Every green beater that followed got measured against it, and the entire vanilla-test conversation (is a creature worth its rate without text?) traces back to this slot. The numbers are deliberately just shy of the line where a topdeck wins the race: four toughness dies to most of the era's red removal, the lack of trample means a single chump blocker stalls it, and the cost is heavy enough that ramping into it competed with simply playing two threats. It is the card the design team kept printing past, each time with one small upgrade (trample here, a point of toughness there, a triggered ability somewhere else), until the comparison stopped being useful and the slot quietly retired. Calling something "a Craw Wurm" is shorthand for a creature whose stat line does all the work and whose rules text does none, a category that green dominated for most of the game's first decade and now occupies mostly as a nostalgia reference. The card itself does nothing surprising; its place in the design canon is that it set the baseline everything else had to clear.