Serpent of the Endless Sea
The second clause is the whole reason this serpent is a fish out of water. A creature whose body scales with your Island count is a familiar mono-blue payoff: the more you commit to the element, the bigger the beast. But the design pairs that reward with a leash, forbidding the attack unless the defending player also controls an Island. Against a mono-red or mono-green opponent who never plays a single Island, the Serpent simply cannot swim forward; it sits as a wall, large but stranded, defending the shore it came from. That restriction encodes the flavor literally into the rules: an ocean predator that only hunts in its own waters. The effect is a creature that grows in proportion to your devotion to one color while remaining hostage to whether the table shares your terrain, a tension that makes it far more reliable as a blocker than as a threat. It belongs to the lineage of land-counted bodies that ask you to flood the board with a single basic, but where most of those cards just want the power, this one attaches a clause that turns the matchup itself into the variable. In a mirror of blue decks it is a genuine finisher; against anything that abandons Islands entirely, it is a tide that never comes in.
