Kird Ape

The original two-color manafixing test. A red one-drop that asks you to also play green lands, paying for its stat line in deckbuilding commitment rather than mana: an early structural argument that a creature could be cheap on its face and expensive in the manabase. The design is almost a riddle. The body costs a single red, but the rate (a 2/3 for one, two full points of toughness ahead of where a vanilla red one-drop sits) is conditional on you having already done the work of building a two-color base that supports a Forest. Every aggressive red-green creature since has descended from this lineage, from Wild Nacatl widening the condition to three colors to the various domain and converge creatures that scale on lands controlled. The card also did quiet work for the color pie: it established that red-green's aggressive overlap was a real place to print to, not just a coincidence of two aggressive colors sharing space. The ability checks for a Forest, not a green permanent or green mana spent, which is the cleanest possible version of the test: it asks about the land in play, the most public and least gameable piece of information on the board.