Dwarven Song

Color-changing effects occupy a strange corner of early design: they exist to interact with protection, with color-keyed hosers, and with the cards that read a creature's color before deciding what to do. This is the red, one-mana instant version of that toolkit, and the wording is the genuinely unusual part. Most color-shift effects of this era touch a single target; the multi-target structure here scales the spell with the number of creatures you point it at, which is its only real edge over its contemporaries. The strategic axis is color-checking at instant speed. Paint your own threats with a fresh color to slip past a removal spell keyed to the color they used to be, where the answer resolves looking for a color the creature no longer has. Or push the deception the other direction: make an opponent's creature red and then leave it exposed to an anti-red hoser like Hydroblast or Red Elemental Blast, which would not have touched it a moment earlier. Note the strict boundary the targeting imposes: this is a red spell, so it cannot even point at a creature with protection from red, and changing a creature's color never strips an ability it already has. What the single mana buys is the chance to rewrite which color-checking interactions resolve in your favor, after blocks or in response to a hoser hitting the stack. The design did not age into modern play because the protection cycles and color-keyed hosers it was built around were retired as a design pillar. What remains is a piece of period engineering: an instant whose entire job was to lie about a creature's color.