Rootwater Alligator

A regeneration ability priced in lands rather than mana, which sounds clever until you count what it costs you. Most regenerators of this era charged a mana to shrug off a removal spell or a bad block; this one asks you to feed a Forest to the graveyard each time, permanently shrinking your own board to keep a 3/2 alive. That is the design trade laid bare: the activation is technically free of mana, but the resource it consumes is the one your whole deck is built on. Green's regeneration tradition leaned toward mana sinks and toughness boosts; tying the effect to land sacrifice instead reframes the body as something you defend by going backwards. The math rarely favors it, since a four-mana 3/2 is not the creature you want to be ablating your own ramp to protect, and there is no upside built into the sacrifice (no ramp payoff, no graveyard trigger, no land-matters reward) to soften the loss. It reads as a textbook example of the late-90s habit of pricing a keyword in an unusual resource without first asking whether anyone would pay it. The Crocodile body and swamp-dwelling flavor are the most durable thing about it; the regeneration clause is a curiosity, a window into how Wizards experimented with alternative costs before the design language settled on what was actually worth doing.