Spectral Bears

A 3/3 for two mana in green should have been a beating in 1996, when the format's fair two-drops ran a full size smaller. The drawback is what keeps it honest, and the cost structure is among the strangest of its era: attack into a player who controls no black nontoken permanents and the bear stumbles, sidelined from the next combat because it won't untap on your following turn. The card reads as color-pie politics frozen into a creature, except the politics are reversed from what the rate suggests. The condition keys on the opponent's board rather than your own resources, a rare piece of design then and rarer now. The bear runs free only against black, swinging every turn without penalty when the opponent fields a black nontoken permanent; against everyone else it pays the toll, hobbling after every attack. That makes the spirit a hoser pointed at one color, a beater that turns clean against black mages and gets metered out on alternate turns against the rest of the table. The cadence is the whole card: an oversized body that attacks once every two turns most of the time, and the clause that prices it is aimed at exactly one opponent. A rate that looks broken until you read the condition, and a condition narrow enough that the broken rate almost never arrives.