Land Leeches

A green creature with first strike, which is most of the editorial story right there: green almost never gets to swing first. The color's combat identity is built around going big and trading up, fight spells, and toughness that survives the exchange, not the keyword that lets a small body kill before it dies. First strike has lived primarily in white and red, where it reinforces aggression and orderly combat; handing it to a 2/2 in green made for a body that could trade above its weight in early-era combat math, beating opposing creatures that lacked the keyword and walking through a chump unscathed. The rate is unremarkable by any modern standard, and the leech flavor never grew into a tribe. What the card documents is a period when color-pie boundaries were still being drawn loosely, when a designer could reach for the cleanest mechanical answer to "make a green body relevant in a fight" without first asking whether green was supposed to have that tool at all. The pie has tightened considerably since; first strike on green creatures is now a rare, deliberate exception rather than something a common could carry. The value here is documentary: it shows how the combat keywords were once handed out before the color identities hardened around them, back when "green" and "swings first" did not yet read as a contradiction.