Hooded Kavu

The whole pitch here is a manabase ultimatum: a 2/2 for three sits inert in mono-red, and its lone ability stays dormant until a black source shows up to flip the switch. That activation justifies the entire design. Pay one black and the creature can be blocked only by artifact creatures or black creatures, which on most boards means it can be blocked by nothing at all, turning a forgettable beater into evasion you buy fresh each combat. This is the gold-aligned philosophy of the multicolor era encoded into a single common: fine in one color, genuinely good in two, rewarding the splash without punishing anyone who declines it. The cost structure is what keeps the rate honest. You pay black again every turn you want to swing with fear, so the evasion is rented rather than owned, and the price scales with how often you actually need it. Worth noting that paying the black mana twice in the same turn does nothing: fear is a binary state, so a second activation buys no extra evasion. The card commits once per combat and asks no more of you than that. Modest in a vacuum, sharp in an environment built to push players toward a second color anyway.