Rime Dryad

The clearest argument for why Ice Age built a whole supertype rather than a one-off keyword. Forestwalk had existed since Alpha as landwalk evasion: a static ability that lets a creature slip past blockers as long as the defending player controls a Forest. This narrows that condition to snow Forests specifically, which turns a near-automatic bonus (every green deck runs Forests) into a conditional one that only fires against opponents who chose to build a snow manabase. The evasion checks the defending player's lands, not its controller's, so the design does something a plain forestwalker never could: it makes the opponent's commitment to the new permanent type the lever that switches the ability on. That is the entire point. Tie evasion to a basic-land subtype every deck already plays and you get reliable but uninteresting unblockability; tie it instead to a supertype the field must actively opt into, and you get a creature that interacts with an emerging theme rather than the manabase at large. Snow was the experimental load-bearing mechanic of its era, and cheap bodies like this one were the proof of concept: low-stakes creatures that gave the new permanent type something to reference. The 1/2 body is incidental. What matters is that this demonstrates how a single supertype can retrofit an old keyword into new conditional space, and the template (evasion keyed to snow permanents the opponent controls) was already sitting in the rules when snow returned decades later as a supported mechanic.