Undergrowth

A Fog with a splash cost that betrays its design intent: the optional payment carves an exception into a symmetrical combat-damage wipe, leaving red creatures still able to connect while everything else's swings evaporate. The exception is global, not yours alone: pay the red and any red creature on either side still deals its combat damage, so the card rewards you only when your red attackers are the ones in profitable combat and the opponent has nothing red to swing back with. That is the wrinkle. The base mode is the most generic combat trick in the game, the kind of stall that buys a turn against an alpha strike, but the additional cost is where the card asks something specific of your board: a free combat step where your red creatures are connecting and your opponent's red presence is absent. This is Alliances doing what that set did best, building two-color tension into a single nominally green card and pricing a sided combat trick behind a Gruul-colored splash. It is an artifact of an era when Wizards experimented with cards whose secondary mode rewarded a specific guild pairing rather than folding every effect into one color. The mechanic is clever; the conditions under which the clever half actually breaks symmetry in your favor are narrow enough that the card never escaped the binder.