Radjan Spirit

Green's relationship with the skies was once governed by a rule the color pie has long since loosened: it could field bigger ground creatures than anyone, but it was not permitted to shoot down a flyer, and barely permitted to touch one at all. The workaround was this template, a repeatable tap that strips flying as a temporary debuff and hands the killing blow to combat or to another color. Tap-to-ground-it persisted for years as green's sanctioned answer before the game settled on cleaner one-shot removal like Plummet. What dates the design is the rate: a 3/2 with no evasion of its own, an ability that costs a tap and lasts only until end of turn, asking its controller to commit a creature and a card to neutralize a single attacker for one combat step. The more durable curiosity is the creature type. Spirit meant almost nothing as a tribe when this was printed; the card sat nearly alone in its type line for a decade before Kamigawa retroactively built Spirits a home and a mechanical identity. The type line reads like a placeholder for a tribe the game had not yet thought to develop, written long before any set gave Spirits a reason to share a keyword.