Pardic Collaborator

This is a red creature whose pump button only works if you can produce black mana, and that off-color requirement is the entire point of the design. A 2/2 first striker for four was a forgettable rate even in the early era this comes from, so the body was never the sell: the activated ability is, and it is written to be useless in a single-color shell. Feed it black and the first-strike frame grows past whatever it blocks or attacks into, killing before it takes a return swing, but a mono-red deck holds an inert beater that does nothing the line of text promises. The coupling is deliberate. This belongs to a wave of designs from a black-pushed block where individual cards reached across the color pie to reward a specific two-color commitment, baking the splash into the card rather than leaving it to deckbuilding preference. The first-strike keyword does real work in that frame: it means each point of black-fueled pump translates directly into a combat advantage rather than just a bigger trade, since the creature deals its enlarged damage first. What you have is a red card engineered to malfunction on its own and pay off only when you run the color it was designed to lean on, a small, pointed argument for going two colors instead of one.