Saruli Caretaker

Most one-mana accelerants pay for their speed with a body that folds to the first attacker or burn spell it meets; this Dryad buys durability instead, sitting behind Defender on a 0/3 frame that outlasts the fragile dorks sharing its slot on the curve. The cost of that resilience lives in the activation: it taps itself and a second untapped creature to produce a single mana of any color, once per turn. That second creature is what pays for the color flexibility, and it means the card does nothing the moment it resolves and nothing at all when the rest of your board is empty, so it never rescues an isolated opening hand. What it does provide is any-color output threaded through a green one-drop, without the usual green bargain of a mana creature that dies the moment someone swings. Three toughness is the difference maker: it survives combat to untap again while cheaper accelerants trade themselves away in the first attack step. The design belongs to a small line of creatures that generate mana by tapping a second creature rather than only themselves, which shifts the constraint from mana value to board presence: it demands a companion to function, but asks nothing about that companion's stats, so any warm body (a defender, a fresh token, a summoning-sick threat) becomes fuel. The output stays capped at one mana per turn no matter how wide you go; what a larger board buys is not more mana but reliability, a spare creature always ready to be tapped.