Palladia-Mors

The original Elder Dragon cycle preserves an early design philosophy in amber: enormous evasive bodies gated behind a triple-color upkeep tax that pulls the rug out if you cannot keep paying rent. This is the Naya member of that quintet, and her upkeep is a brutal manabase request. Red, green, and white in the same turn was something the 1994 card pool could barely answer, which meant the dragon often sacrificed herself a turn or two after landing, dragging her controller's eight-mana investment off the board with her. The design intent reads clearly across the cycle: these were aspirational top-ends, finishers you built a deck to support, not midrange threats you slammed and forgot. The upkeep clause is structurally a recurring sustain cost without escalation, a rent that punishes color-greedy manabases at exactly the moment they have already strained to cast a 7/7 flyer. Later dragons (The Ur-Dragon, the long parade of subsequent legendary dragons) inherit the silhouette (big, flying, multicolored, legendary) while quietly discarding the self-destruct clause. That clause is what makes the originals historically interesting rather than merely large: they are an early attempt to balance a giant flying body with a downside that could realistically take it away, before the design language shifted toward making the rate itself the balancing factor. The dragon does not punish you with damage or a lost game; it simply leaves, taking the tempo you spent to deploy it.