Water Wurm

A quiet joke at blue's own expense, and an artifact of when Wizards still treated conditional, opponent-facing stat bumps as a worthwhile design lever. The toughness bonus only materializes when an opponent is also playing the same color this creature lives in, which means it is built to scale against a mirror and to sit there as a vanilla 1/1 against everyone else. That is the inversion worth pausing on: most creatures of this period that cared about an opponent's lands punished off-color choices, rewarding the controller for guessing the metagame right. This one does the opposite, paying out precisely when both players have committed to blue. The result is a card whose entire combat relevance is gated behind a board state the pilot does not control and cannot reliably force. Even fully switched on, the payoff is a single point of toughness on a one-power body, the kind of marginal number that tells you the constraint was the point and the rate was an afterthought. It sits among a handful of early designs that experimented with reading the opponent's board as a balancing dial, before the lesson settled in that conditional bonuses tied to an opponent's choices make for unreliable cards. A curiosity of how blue's identity was being probed while the color pie was still soft and the design team was willing to print a creature that is, functionally, an in-joke about Islands.