Shaper Guildmage

The guildmage cycle from Mirage hung guild-themed activated abilities off monocolored bodies, asking you to splash two other colors to unlock a creature that on its own does nothing but sit there as a 1/1. The activations here are the thinnest in the set: spend white and a tap for first strike, or black and a tap to nudge a creature's power up by one. Both are combat tricks that rarely swing a game, and the tap-plus-colored-mana tax makes every use a real tempo cost. Worse, the two abilities pull against each other. First strike is defensive, the power bump offensive, and neither pays you back for committing to the white-black mana required to use them. The execution illustrates how early multicolor design tried to reward gold-flavored manabases before Wizards found tighter models for utility creatures: hang two color-pie effects on a cheap creature, gate them behind off-color mana, and hope the splash feels rewarded. It rarely did. The two-ability mage frame proved durable even when this version did not; later sets returned to it with sharper effects and cleaner color identities, leaving this one as evidence of how much an activated ability's rate matters once the creature attached to it is barely a creature at all.