Scarwood Goblins

A vanilla 2/2 for two colors of mana, printed in an era when gold cards were still a novelty and the going rate for a two-mana 2/2 in a single color was the unremarkable baseline. The Dark experimented with multicolor as a cost rather than a reward: a card that demanded both red and green to deploy, and then handed you nothing for the trouble beyond a body any mono-colored common could already field. That is the design honesty of early gold cards laid bare. The two-color requirement is pure friction, a manabase tax with no payoff stapled to it, because the period had not yet worked out that asking for a second color obligates the card to do something a single color could not. Later sets learned to make the gold cost buy keyword density, an activated ability, or a stat bump above curve. This one is the control sample from before that lesson, the kind of card that documents what designers were still figuring out rather than what they had solved.