Warden of the First Tree

A one-mana 1/1 that becomes a finisher if the game keeps letting you pay for it. The core idea is a creature that doubles as a mana sink, scaled across three escalating tiers so a topdeck in the late game is never dead weight: the body climbs from 1/1 to a 3/3 Warrior to a trampling lifelinker to an 8/8 (five +1/+1 counters dumped onto the Spirit's 3/3 base), each rung gated behind the one before it. The hybrid in every activation cost is the genuine trick: a card whose mana value is a single green pip, yet whose abilities bend into two entirely different colors, so the deck has to field a manabase wider than the casting cost implies. That is the tension paying for the upside. The floor is fragile, and although each activation resolves at instant speed (counters can arrive mid-attack or on the stack against a removal spell), the math stays back-loaded, demanding a heap of mana the 1/1 never earns on its own. It sits alongside the era's other grow-over-time bodies (leveler creatures, outlast costs) built to give aggressive decks somewhere to spend flooded mana, but this one folds the whole curve into a single permanent instead of splitting it across cards. The reward is real; it only closes if the board stays clear long enough to keep feeding it.