Tarpan

A green one-drop built to die. The 1/1 body was a fair rate in the mid-1990s, and the death trigger was the rider that nudged it one notch above the truly vanilla creatures sharing its slot. That trigger is the whole pitch: this thing exists to trade, and it pays you a single point of life on the way out, so it works less as a beater than as a polite speed bump that softens whatever runs into it. The value is incidental, a small consolation prize attached to a creature whose main job is to be a creature, printed before sacrifice outlets and aristocrat payoffs had a vocabulary to exploit a death trigger on purpose. There is nothing structural to build around here: no counter to manage, no scaling, no second mode, just a baseline body and a sliver of life as it leaves. The Horse type and modest stat line place it firmly among green's roster of small, expendable bodies from the period. It survives now mostly as a yardstick: a clean example of how early sets used minor death-triggered riders to lift a creature above the plain ones, and a marker for measuring how far the death-trigger creature has traveled since.