Scavenger Folk

One of green's earliest artifact answers, and an early study in how the color was made to pay for its tools. Artifact destruction has always been green's job in the color pie; what changed across the decades is the rate at which green gets to do that job. Here the work is front-loaded onto a body: a fragile one-drop that has to survive a turn of summoning sickness, then pays one green mana, taps, and sacrifices itself for a single shot of removal. The artifact destruction is welded to a permanent rather than printed as a spell, and that permanent consumes itself to fire. The cost is real: the answer sits on the board a full turn before it can act, telegraphed to the opponent, and once it fires the body is gone for good. The upside is reactivity. The activation carries no timing restriction, so once summoning sickness clears it can be held up and fired at instant speed in response to whatever the artifact is trying to do, or simply pointed at any artifact already on the table. That trade (a turn of exposure and a creature spent, in exchange for a one-shot you can hold for the right window) is the design statement. White and red bought artifact destruction by the spell; green bought it by the body, with the bonus that the body can block or chip in a point before it goes. The pattern green refined ever since (Reclamation Sage and its descendants, creatures that bolt artifact removal onto a stat line) starts close to here: a rough early articulation of green's preference for answers attached to bodies.