Storm Spirit

The tap-to-deal-2-damage activated ability is among the oldest pinger templates in the game, and on an evasive 3/3 it makes a respectable attrition engine: a flyer that picks off X/2s and chips two off anything that tries to race. The problem is the bill attached to it. Six mana spread across green, white, and blue buys a fragile body in an era whose lands offered almost nothing to make casting a three-color creature plausible. Early multicolor design treated color count as a power dial: load a card with more pips and trust the cost itself to read as strength, before the discipline arrived that a gold card's color requirement is a real tax the effect has to earn back. Here the package and the colors are mismatched. The unrestricted ping (damage to any creature, not just one in combat) belongs squarely to the blue this card already demands, but green and white contribute nothing to it; green does not ping at all, and white tends to fence its creature damage to combat. So two of the three colors pay only for the body and the flying keyword, not for the ability that defines the card. Worse, a repeatable sit-back blocker-killer wants to play defense, while a Bant shell of green, white, and blue is built to attack. The result is a snapshot of multicolor design before anyone decided color count had to justify itself.