Shivan Emissary

The kicker mechanic of this era built multicolor identity by stapling a second color's effect onto a single-color creature, and few examples wear the seam as visibly as this one. The base spell buys a 1/1 with no abilities, a deliberately overpriced floor that no one casts for the body alone; spend the additional and the card swings into black to do what black does best, destroying a nonblack creature with no regeneration permitted. The logic runs both directions: a mono-red player has access to a creature when nothing better presents itself, a Rakdos player has the removal waiting whenever a target does. That nonblack clause is where the borrowed color shows through. This is removal phrased in black's own dialect, carrying black's traditional blind spot intact, rather than a generic kill spell loaned to red. What lifts the card above a vanilla creature with a tacked-on mode is the window it keeps open: the destruction fires off the creature resolving rather than off a spell on the stack, so the removal sits in hand disguised as a body, deployable when there is no target and never stranded on an empty board. The tax pays for that flexibility honestly. You spend the extra to fold a removal spell into a creature, and you spend it only on the turns you want both.