Whippoorwill

A green answer to a problem green has almost never been allowed to solve: the creature that refuses to stay dead. For one green mana, this 1/1 Bird is a body that exists to be tapped, its activated ability a surgical kit aimed at everything that makes a creature hard to kill with combat or damage. It shuts off regeneration, closes the redirection trick that lets damage be shunted to another permanent or player, nullifies prevention shields, and forces the body to stay gone by exiling it when it dies. Read against the era it came from, that is a remarkable stack of clauses: color-pie engineering from a time when individual cards routinely carried four or five lines of rules text to patch a single interaction. The double-green activation cost is the tax that keeps the effect honest, since a one-mana enabler that bought all of this for free would have been a strange power outlier in green. What the Bird does not do is deal the damage itself; it is a setup piece, stripping defenses so that something else can finish the kill cleanly and keep it dead. That dependency is the design's real signature. The card is built not to attack or block but to pre-emptively disarm the protection layer on a target, and it remains one of the most thorough versions of that idea green was ever handed.