People of the Woods
Green's first attempt at a creature whose body grows with your manabase, and a revealing snapshot of how cautiously Wizards approached defensive green in the game's earliest years. The power sits at a fixed 1; everything interesting lives in the toughness, which scales only with Forests, not with green sources or lands generally. That narrow condition defines the whole card: it rewards a mono-green commitment and punishes the splashed manabase, so the creature is at its largest precisely when you least need a wall and at its smallest when you most do. The split between static power and growing toughness also locks it into a purely defensive role, a blocker that never threatens to close a game on its own. That conservatism reads as ancient now, when green routinely gets bodies that grow in both directions and count lands of any kind, but it marks one of the genre's starting points: the toughness-equals-permanent-count creature, later refined into cleaner and more aggressive forms. The friction here is real and not entirely intentional, since a creature whose survival depends on never losing a Forest is fragile in ways the designers of the era did not yet have the tools to address. It survives as a curiosity of how toughness-as-a-counter was conceived before the mechanic learned to do anything but sit still.
