Prey Upon

Green doesn't get to point a spell at a creature and watch it die. It gets to throw one of its own creatures at the target and hope its power wins the exchange. Fight is the keyword that lets the color interact without violating the color-pie rule that green cannot simply destroy a creature on demand, and at one mana this is the most stripped-down delivery of that promise. The cost it hides is structural rather than printed: you need a board presence to cast it at all, and your attacker absorbs the return damage, so a one-sided kill requires a power gap your creature can survive. That asymmetry is what separates fight from true removal. A burn spell or a destroy effect spends only mana; this spends mana plus a measure of your own creature's resilience, and against a deck with no blockers worth fighting it sits dead in your hand. The payoff is that green, built to flood the board with bodies, frequently has the larger creature lying around anyway, turning a sorcery-speed liability into a near-free trade. Later fight cards bundled the effect onto a creature or attached upside (a +1/+1 counter, lifegain, a second target), but the unadorned version is the rate against which those additions are priced.