Vine Dryad

Pitch a green card from hand and a 1/3 Dryad slides onto the battlefield for free, flashed in mid-combat or once an opponent's turn winds down with your mana left untouched. The proposition is stranger than the modest body suggests. Green's whole identity in this era leaned on creatures that came down on curve and traded up the chain, not on exiling a resource to flash in a defensive wall. So the deal runs against the grain: you spend a card rather than tempo, holding the Dryad in reserve. Forestwalk supplies the only offense the small frame can muster, an evasion clause that fires precisely against decks built to clog the ground with green bodies, so it can still chip in damage where it might otherwise sit useless. The mana-free mode is an early ancestor of what later sets formalized as pitch costs: exile a card of the right color to skip paying, the same machinery behind Force of Will and, much further down the line, the green pitch elementals. The wrinkle is that this version wraps that machinery around a flash blocker rather than a counterspell or a free threat, which deliberately caps the payoff. What it established, though, holds up: a green creature could arrive without ever spending the mana you had available, a quiet precedent for a color usually bound tightly to its land count.