Ivory Guardians

Hate-creature design from an era before that idea had a name. The protection-from-red clause and the conditional pump form a single coherent statement: this is an answer built to face down red, and it grows by a point precisely when the matchup it cares about shows up across the table. The self-referential pump (the "creatures named Ivory Guardians" wording) is also a fossil of mid-90s template language, written before Wizards developed the lord-style conventions that would later standardize how a creature talks about copies of itself. Six mana for a 3/3 (4/4 when a nontoken red permanent is on the other side) reads as wildly overpriced by modern standards, but Legends treated protection as a premium keyword and assumed a hard lock against a color's burn suite was worth the cost. What makes the design worth a second look is its structural honesty: the card does not pretend to be a generic threat. It is a tuned answer with a built-in payoff, a creature whose size scales with the color it was meant to oppose. The lineage from here to later conditional hate creatures (the run of bodies that grow against a tribe, against artifacts, against graveyards) is direct, even if the rate took decades to catch up to the idea.