Shadow Guildmage

A black one-drop that taxes you blue and red mana to function: that is the design tell of the Mirage-era guildmages, a five-card cycle whose members each wore one color on the body but reached into the two colors flanking it on the wheel for their activated abilities. The conceit was a top-down riff on guild membership: a wizard trained across the color pie, charging you off-color mana for off-color tricks. Here the menu is a bounce that returns one of your own creatures to its library top (a way to reset an enters-the-battlefield trigger, dodge a removal spell, or smooth your next draw) and a pinger that deals 1 to any target and 1 to your own face. Neither ability runs clean: the blue mode demands a second color and only ever helps your own board, while the red mode bills you a life every time you fire it. That self-inflicted point is the discipline that prices the repeatable damage; you pay the toll in life as well as mana, so it never reads as a strict upgrade on a generic one-damage shock. Read the cycle together and you see early design wrestling with multicolor identity before gold cards and hybrid mana settled the question: a mono-colored creature whose toolbox quietly insists you run three colors to unlock it.