Gibbering Hyenas

Green gets the oversized body; black gets the free swing past it. That trade is written directly into the rules text here, and it captures the green-versus-black tension that early design liked to spell out one card at a time. The 3/2 frame for is aggressive by mid-90s standards, and the price of that aggression is a single clause that hands black an offensive edge in precisely the matchup green was meant to push around. The restriction is narrow enough to be irrelevant against half the table and sharp enough to feel like a tax against the rest, which is the entire function of a "can't block" line as a balancing lever: it sits dormant most games, then bites in the one matchup the designers wanted to police. This was a common dialect on its plane (creatures barred from blocking or attacking certain colors, damage dealt or prevented along color lines), a vocabulary that treated the color pie as something negotiated card by card rather than expressed through keyword identity. Modern green beaters no longer carry sentences like this; the same work is done now by simply pricing the creature higher or shrinking its numbers. What survives is a balancing philosophy that has mostly been retired: pay full freight for the body, then accept a structural blind spot wherever black sits across from you.