Vodalian Zombie

Two creature types stapled to a single hate clause, and a body that does nothing once green leaves the table. Protection from green on a 2/2 reads as targeted insurance: it blanks the era's green fatties in combat and slips under green removal entirely, but offers nothing against the other four colors. That narrowness is the entire bargain. A 2/2 that plays like a blank for two colored mana is a poor rate outside green, so the card pays you back only in the one matchup its keyword names. As color-pie philosophy it is clean: green is the color of large creatures and pump, which makes protection from green the most combat-relevant single-color protection you can hand a creature. But the design also belongs to a period when sets leaned on protection as a tribal and matchup tool rather than a generically strong keyword, the kind of insurance you wanted in your deck only because the format had a color worth insuring against. The Merfolk Zombie typing, meanwhile, never amounted to anything; it is a multitype oddity that exists because an allied two-color slot needed a body and someone liked the flavor of an undersea undead. Both halves of the card, the typeline and the lone line of text, point at obsolescence the moment the table looks anything other than green.