Loam Lion
The descendant of Kird Ape, and the design tells you exactly what Wizards learned in the twenty years between them. Kird Ape was a red creature that wanted a Forest, the famous off-color land requirement that made Zoo decks splash green just for the boost. This one moves the same trick into white: the same +1/+2 bonus, the same 2/3 body once a Forest is on the table, the same one-mana rate. What changes is not the math but the question it answers. Kird Ape pushed red's aggression into green's territory; Loam Lion gives a white aggressive shell a one-drop that grows into a real body, a 2/3 that clears the early-game ground creatures a vanilla 1/1 would trade with and shrugs off the incidental pings a 2/2 would not. The Forest clause is the price, and it is a genuine one: without green in your manabase the card stays a 1/1, so it only belongs in decks already committed to the Selesnya overlap. The lineage is the whole story here. Two cards, two decades apart, built on identical bones (the dual-land dependency, the one-mana cost, the 1/1-to-2/3 climb) and pointed at opposite halves of the color pie. Loam Lion is what the Kird Ape design looks like once white is the color asking green for a favor instead of the other way around.



