Drowned

A study in early off-color activated costs, back when the design vocabulary for two-color identity was still being written one card at a time. The body is a plain 1/1, but its entire reason to exist is the black activation grafted onto a blue creature: a regeneration shield paid for outside the spell's own color. The Dark leaned hard on this idea of allied effects bleeding across the color pie, treating regeneration as a generic survival tool rather than something gated to specific bodies. Here is a creature that costs blue mana to deploy but demands a black source to keep alive, a tension that reads as awkward by modern standards but was a deliberate texture choice in an era when designers were still probing how much cross-color friction a single card could carry. Regeneration was the survival mechanic of its day, the answer to a board state full of unconditional removal and trading attackers; tying it to a flimsy frame meant the card asked you to invest mana repeatedly just to keep a 1/1 on the table. The rate is poor, and that is beside the point. What the card preserves is the artifact of process: a snapshot of a moment when "blue creature that wants black mana" was a sentence Wizards was willing to print without a clean tribal or mechanical justification, simply to see how multicolor demand felt in practice.