Shanodin Dryads

Forestwalk on a one-mana 1/1 captures, about as plainly as Magic ever managed, an idea the game tried early and largely set aside: evasion that only fires against your own color. The landwalk cycle of the earliest sets gave every color a cheap creature that ignored a particular basic land type, and green's was always going to sit at the floor on cost, because the green mirror was the matchup the designers cared about least. That conditional inverts the usual protection-from logic. Against any deck without Forests, the keyword is decoration and you are paying one mana for a vanilla 1/1; against a green opponent, that same 1/1 becomes an uninterruptible one-point-per-turn clock that no blocker can stop. The design is uncomplicated by intent: "what does this creature do" could honestly be answered with "it walks past Forests." What actually undercut the cycle was the opposite of obsolescence. As manabases leaned on duals, shocks, and tri-lands that carry basic land types, landwalk grew more reliable, not less, since a Forestwalker now threatens any deck whose green sources happen to be Forests by type. The keyword's real problem was never that opponents stopped running Forests; it was that an evasion ability so binary (live or dead with nothing in between) made for thin, swingy design, and that is why forestwalk and its siblings became a record of how narrowly the earliest sets thought about combat.