Uktabi Orangutan
The clean synthesis of two effects green had always paid full price for separately: a body and an artifact answer in one card. Naturalize and its kin asked you to trade a card for a target with nothing left over; a vanilla 2/2 asked you to do nothing but attack. This bundles both, and the bundling is the whole design. The destroy trigger fires on entry rather than as a cast or activated ability, so the artifact dies once the trigger resolves and the 2/2 sticks around to keep applying pressure: a two-for-one that costs no extra mana and leaves a creature behind to be flickered or recurred for repeat value. Green's color-pie claim on artifact destruction is one of its oldest and least contested jobs, and this card is the template Wizards has returned to since: staple the removal to a creature so the answer carries its own clock. The targeting is the only friction, and it cuts both ways. The trigger is mandatory and demands a legal target, so against an empty board the Ape enters as a plain bear, and against a board where you control the only artifact, you are forced to blow up your own. That mandatory targeting is the lever that keeps the rate honest rather than letting it run oppressive, the same lever later artifact-hating creatures would pull to justify stronger bodies and abilities.

Rules text
Format Status
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Other printings
- Jumpstart 2022#133
- Magic Online Promos#36016
- World Championship Decks 2000#jk260sb
- World Championship Decks 1999#ml260sb
- World Championship Decks 1999#ml260
- Classic Sixth Edition#260
- World Championship Decks 1998#bs123
- World Championship Decks 1997#js123










