Sprout

Functionally, this is a single mana spent to put one body on the board, with no scaling, no rider, and no upside beyond the token itself. As a standalone card it is barely a card; the Saproling it makes is the floor of green creature production. What gives it any reason to exist is the word "Saproling" and the fact that it is an instant. The token feeds a long line of fungus-and-Saproling payoffs, where a creature's tribe and your ability to make one at instant speed matter more than the stats printed on it. A 1/1 made at end of turn becomes pump-spell fuel, a sacrifice trigger, a spore-counter payoff, or just an extra body to convert through some aristocrat-style engine. The instant timing is the only real design choice here: it lets you hold up the token until you know whether you need a chump blocker, a surprise blocker, or fodder in response to a removal spell. Strip the tribe and the flash and you are left with the most minimal token-maker green can print, which is precisely the point: it was built to be the cheap, unglamorous enabler that a Saproling deck reaches for without thinking, not a card that rewards looking at it in isolation.