Volcano Imp

A black flier that pays red mana for a combat upgrade, this is one of an Invasion-block experiment in off-color activation: creatures whose secondary color hinted at a guild allegiance without forcing a full two-color identity. The mono-black evader stands on its own as a fine, evergreen 2/2 in the air, but the first-strike activation is the tell. It costs red mana, which means the ability is live only in a deck willing to splash, and dead text everywhere else. That asymmetry is the entire design conceit of the cycle: the card reads as monocolored, but it rewards the second color the way a faint pull rewards iron filings. The first-strike grant is a defensive insurance policy more than an aggressive one. A 2/2 with first strike does not beat genuinely larger blockers (a 3-toughness body survives the two damage and kills it back), but it does flip the math on same-size and smaller ground attackers, killing them before they connect and surviving the exchange. Against another small flier it wins the air outright. The point is the cheap, repeatable access to first strike at instant speed, letting the Imp ambush during combat and dodge a sorcery-speed window. It is a clean, modest expression of the era's color-pair philosophy, built before hybrid mana existed to do the same job in a single symbol.