Heartwood Dryad

Green answer tech in the body of a modest creature, printed to patch a single hole in the color pie. Shadow was a phantom mechanic: a creature with it interacted only with its own kind in combat, so an attacker with shadow simply walked past any green board that had no way to reach it. The fix here is deliberately narrow and one-directional. The Dryad pretends to share that phase of combat for defense, stepping in front of an evader that should have been untouchable, and nothing else. It never gains the keyword on offense, blocks normally against everything that lacks shadow, and offers no value against a board built around any other axis. That single-purpose wiring is exactly what dates it. Rather than handing green its own evasion to answer the asymmetry symmetrically, the designers built a creature whose job was to cancel out the other side's, full stop. It is a Tempest-era solution to keyword imbalance in its purest form: a body that exists to deny a mechanic rather than to participate in the broader game. Once that mechanic stopped being a fixture of the environment, the card had no second responsibility to fall back on. What remains is closer to a matchup instruction than a strategic choice, a piece of combat hardware bolted to one opponent who almost never shows up to the table anymore.