Hornet Sting

One damage at instant speed, for a single green mana, is the most green has ever been allowed to do something it is structurally bad at: direct damage to a creature or player on its own terms. Green's removal is conditional by design philosophy: it fights, it bites, it requires its own creature on the board to function. This strips all of that away and hands green a tiny burn spell with no fight clause, no creature attached, no restriction on target. The catch is the number. One damage answers a mana dork, a token, an early one-toughness threat, and almost nothing else, which is precisely why the design was allowed to exist in green at all: the color gets the verb (point a damage anywhere) only because the rate is rationed down to where it cannot threaten the things green is not supposed to kill. It is a deliberate, almost ceremonial concession, a reminder of where the color pie's wall sits drawn directly on a card. The single point also makes it a clean enabler rather than an answer: a way to flip a damage-matters trigger, push a creature into lethal range, or finish off something already wounded. As a piece of color-pie engineering it says more about green's boundaries than most green cards twice its size.