Elder Spawn
A 6/6 ground beater is not what blue is supposed to get, and this is the price early design charged to hand one over: a recurring upkeep tax that turns your own manabase into ammunition. Skip the Island payment and the creature is gone and you have taken six to the face, which means the card is really asking you to commit to a mono-Island base deep enough to feed it across a long game. The cost is not paid once at cast; it is paid every turn, forever. The clause that keeps red creatures from blocking it does double duty: a flavor nod (it is a sea horror, red things are presumably on land) that also patched the worst matchup for a fat blue creature in the era's color pie, when red's mountainwalkers and burn-backed ground troops were the natural predators of anything slow. The whole package reads as a designer trying to solve "how do we let blue cast a serious finisher" before blue had been given the toolkit (cheap card draw, reliable counters at the right rate, evasive fliers) that later made finishers like Mahamoti Djinn unnecessary to bolt drawbacks onto. This is design from before the color pie hardened into discipline, where the drawback was not a tax stapled onto the body but the entire reason the body got to be this big.
