Grizzly Bears

"A bear" is design vocabulary, and this card minted the term: a vanilla green creature priced so that any future two-drop could be measured against it, regardless of creature type. Through Magic's early years, that rate was the line in the sand. Anything better needed a drawback (Wild Dogs), a tribal tag (Savannah Lions sat in white at one less mana, the perennial color-pie argument), or a downshift in stats elsewhere. R&D used the Bear as a calibration tool, and green getting this exact body with no rider and no restriction reflects an early color-pie decision that green's identity was efficient creatures first and tricks second. A dozen functional reprints have carried this same body under different names (Bear Cub, Balduvian Bears, Runeclaw Bears, and onward), each an exercise in whether the flat floor still held at common in that environment. The slow creep of two-mana creatures past the vanilla baseline (first one keyword, then two, then enters-the-battlefield text) maps the power curve as plainly as anything in the game, and Grizzly Bears is the fixed point you measure that curve against.