Fire Sprites

Color filtering on a body, from a time when Wizards was still pricing color-shifting mana by feel. The Faerie chassis is the giveaway: a 1/1 flier was the cheap evasive shell green could justify because the real card is the activated ability, a fixer narrowed to a single off-color output. Note that this is filtering, not ramp; the cost to produce nets zero mana, so the card converts green into red one pip at a time rather than accelerating you. That points it squarely at the green-red overlap, the play pattern of paying for red effects off a green base before that color pair had earned a name. The constraint that keeps the rate honest is the tap cost paired with summoning sickness: the turn it lands it does nothing, so the conversion always arrives a turn behind. Compared to Birds of Paradise, which taps for any color and asks for no mana in return, the Sprites give up flexibility and free output, while the chassis itself buys a single point of power (a 1/1 rather than the Bird's 0/1) at the cost of a one-way, fixed exchange. The design idea (creature-as-color-source with a body that matters in the air) recurs throughout green's history, and these Sprites sit near the front of that lineage; the seams still show in how narrow and how lossy the conversion is.