Rushwood Legate

The Legate cycle from Mercadian Masques was an experiment in conditional free spells: each one had a body roughly worth its mana cost, but if your opponent was playing a particular color of land and you were playing yours, you could simply skip the bill entirely. This Dryad pays off when green sits across from blue, a matchup the design treats as a grudge: a tempo swing that arrives for nothing in exactly the games where blue most wants to be developing on its own clock. The constraint is doing all the work. There is no cost reduction, no mana floor, no kicker; it is binary. Either both lands are on the battlefield when you go to cast, or you pay full freight for a fragile creature. That makes the card a metagame instrument rather than a maindeck staple, the kind of build-around that only earns its slot when you can reliably point it at the color it was tuned against. The whole cycle reads as a designer asking what happens when you let aggression hardcast its threats for free in a color-versus-color rivalry, and then sandbagging the answer behind a land condition strict enough that it rarely fires by accident. The body is unremarkable on purpose; the free cast is the entire premise, and the premise is conditional by construction.