Gaea's Liege

A genuine Alpha curiosity: a green fattie whose size is keyed to a board state it can rewrite with its own tap ability. The land-to-Forest line is what makes the whole design tick, and it reads stranger the longer you look at it. Pointed at your own lands, it grows the Liege. Pointed at an opponent's lands, it converts them for the attacking clause, so the Liege swings as large as the defender's now-Forest manabase; the same tap also strips those lands of any nonbasic utility (the special abilities go away when the type line becomes plain Forest), even as they keep tapping for green. The "until this creature leaves the battlefield" duration was unusual for 1993: a permanent type-change that persists across turns but unwinds cleanly on death, with no upkeep tax and no stack interaction beyond the activation itself. Richard Garfield was clearly chasing the fantasy that green is the color that asserts the world is already a forest and the other players just haven't noticed yet. The cost and a body that does nothing the turn it lands keep this one boxed in among the collectors and the curious, but the territorial-conversion theme it expresses is one of green's cleanest early statements, and the tap ability remains a genuinely interesting design primitive that Wizards has only rarely revisited.