Deepwood Legate

A black deck staring at an opponent's Forest gets to drop a body for zero, and that bet is the entire reason this Shade exists. The Legates were a small cycle from this era, each priced at free when the matchup pointed the right way: deploy across the table from a particular enemy-color land while you hold the right basic, and you skip the bill entirely. Funded by metagame positioning, the wager pays out against green and goes bust against everyone else, where you are stuck shelling out four mana for a 1/1 that needs black poured into it before it threatens anything in combat. The pump ability is what rescues a freely-cast nothing of a creature: hold up mana, grow the Shade into a clock, the same black-mana-sink template running back to Frozen Shade. The two halves recruit opposite hands, though. The free cast wants a lean, aggressive curve; the pump wants a flooded one, a board state where you have spare black lying around turn after turn. Worse, any removal spell answers the grown creature for a sliver of the mana you sank into it. What you end up with is sideboard logic stitched into the maindeck: a creature that overperforms against one quarter of the field and idles against the rest, gambling that an opponent's color choice will cover its cost on your behalf.